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In Quappi’s bone-white face, her red lips assume a sweetly wry expression while visually exploding like a grenade. – Peter Schjeldahl, “The French Disconnection” (The New Yorker, March 8, 1999)
In the flesh, a single beautifully judged swipe of washed-out Indian Red, tracing the collar of the child’s T-shirt, jumpstarts the picture into succulent immediacy. – Julian Bell, “At the Whitechapel: Wilhelm Sasnal" (London Review of Books, January 5, 2012)
The blood in the horse’s nose is beautiful and disgusting, bubbling out of the nostril with a thick viscosity. It must have been painted with the same pigment, at the same moment, as the wild red of the horseman’s turban, which itself has the look of a bleeding bald skull. Maybe the plume of blue tassels issuing from the red like a tuft of hair is meant to evoke a scalping. The two reds – the turban-scalp and the boiling nostril – insist on the beauty of blood. – T. J. Clark, “A Horse’s Impossible Head” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019)
“Red is the first color, the strongest color, the one that stands for color itself,” Arn says. He’s right. He claims some people are scared of it. He’s probably right about that, too. I’m not one of them. I love red. There’s a strange red painting by N. H. Pritchard called Red Abstract / fragment (1968-69. Do you remember it? The New Yorker used it to illustrate one of Peter Schjeldahl’s last pieces – “All Together Now” (April 11, 2022). Schjeldahl said of it, “Red Abstract / fragment is a lyrical verse text typewritten on a brushy red ground and scribbled with restive cross-outs, revisions, and notes. Its meanings dance at the edge of comprehension, but with infectious improvisatory rhythms.”
Red is a rich, fascinating subject. Arn explores it beautifully.
Credit: The above illustration is N. H. Pritchard's Red Abstract / fragment (1968-69).
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