Cadmium Red

When I was quite young - maybe thirteen or fourteen - I used to take the bus into town, and go into the National Gallery at the bottom of the Mound.  I remember going again and again to see one painting: a painting of trees in blossom by Vincent van Gogh.  (It is at the RSA in London at the moment, but it will be back soon!)

Anyway, one week - from saved up pocket money - I bought a set of watercolour paints.  Thinking I would be the next Van Gogh, I tried a couple of things - they were not very good, and the paints ended up in the bottom of a drawer.  But, I never forgot the paints: they had such fantastic names (yellow ochre, Prussian blue, cadmium red!)

In any culture or society, colour tends to carry meanings or suggestions (eg "It was a black day for Scotland.")  In some Higher English classes just now we are reading and talking about the novel The Great Gatsby.  In this novel, F Scott Fitzgerald uses colour to suggest certain things - green for jealousy and money (the colour of dollar bills), white for innocence and purity, etc.

The writer John Berger has written that cadmium red is "the colour of childhood innocence."  Howwever, if you go darker you get the red used in the paintings of Caravaggio.  Here is John Berger again:

"Perhaps my favourite red is Caravaggio's.  He uses it in painting after painting  (The Death of the Virgin in the Louvre for example).  The red by which you swear to love forever.  The red whose father is the knife.  The red which Naguib Mahfouz was thinking about in Cairo, when he wrote 'The beloved may absent herself from existence, but love does not.' "

Now, Caravaggio...