A TOUCH OF RED

A Touch of Red (A Blog by Mike Barr)

“Having a bit of red paint as a little accent is not a new thing and many artists do it, but it doesn’t work every time.

It works well in a painting that has a dominant green theme and it also works well in grey or muted coloured paintings, but it rarely works at all in the midst of blazing colour throughout.

The fact is that it is hard to gain any focus on an overloaded and saturated colour piece. The focus is everywhere and at the same time nowhere.

Today the availability of colour for artists is amazing compared to a couple of hundred years ago, but this doesn’t mean we have some duty to use all of them at once.

As I see it, an artist’s aim is to please the viewer, to make them interested and enter into that which is painted – it is something that the artists have seen and interpreted, and they love it when others get it too.

Some artists may be interested in making social or political statements and these are the ones that tend to get the nod at the big government-sponsored art prizes. Most every-day art lovers though, want to see something that will take them away to a special place or feeling - something that will give them a pleasant experience.

It's a bit of a secret in plain sight to be able to draw the viewer in. It mainly involves having restful places in a painting, so that other bits can shine. It’s really hard to do this if we can only copy what is there in both content and colour – it’s what being an artist is all about.

Interpretation will make a scene belong to an artist and not to the reference it was taken from. In the end we all want a little bit of magic in our work and we don’t always get there – any of us!

I few get to the end of a painting and that little colour accent really works, we’ve created something a bit special.”

Happy Painting

Mike Barr