Red
The treat for the turtle is the same color as the turtle. Why is the woman proffering it looking away from the turtle? And what is the standing girl eating? And does the girl on the right sort of look like a turtle, even though it’s actually just that her hair’s wet and slicked back? But still, why is she looking at the turtle but the woman who’s feeding it is looking away? Kind of funny to make a whole painting out of a casual coincidence, but also sounds pretty good…
This boy holds a red sheet, as would a matador. Three black balls and three half circles, heads of black hair. The balls hard and the hair soft, the one a little bit heavy the other almost weightless. The red sheet drapes the boy in a way that follows his posture, making a twisting vertical that brings the horizontal blue strip that unites his shoulders and head with the head and shoulders of the boy sitting on the right, the boy who’s doing something crouched below the blue, his hair almost exactly above the ball he’s holding, his crouching height almost exactly lined up with the red sheet, the standing boy looks carefully at his ankles, perhaps hoping he won’t get hit just there by a heavy wooden ball, or perhaps being mysteriously or is it just Classically phlegmatic about it.
Both the singular items in both paintings are red, or nearing red. Red turtle. Red sheet. And the turtle can get into his red shell; tuck himself in so to speak.
And, between the two, only one blonde. And she’s looking away, like there’s something much more interesting in the grass that we can’t see…
If you want to draw attention, use the color red. If you want to release serotonin, surround yourself in yellow (not too bright a yellow, which could lead to a sort of fierce blast, like sounding mares loose in the immature grip of weak hands, buried by a deep blare). A golden blonde will do; laughing yellow color. Matisse’s paint strokes seem to produce tangy yellowish-orange streaks, smeared like butter but more palpable a type of soft biscuit cheese that lets us know the youth on the bottom left is looking down and away from us. The back of the young’s girl’s head of hair is nearly of the same size as the turtle. Not to mention as well it’s mimicking the reptile’s form; the soft, fragrant head opposite the hard, brittle shell
Why do these boys not laugh? Why does the girl who seems most at ease, and the one who can wield the timid creature from its isolated unit, why does she not share the same color hair as the other young ladies? Ask the question more than one way: Why does the girl who seems most at ease have the easiest time teasing the timid out of its timidity (if that’s what’s being asked)? The answer is that it is because her confidence is contagious and drives timidity away. Why is the one who can do that blonde? Because being the object of adoration makes one both tough and self-confident, the others don’t need to be tough and thus have no confidence to transmit, subliminally and by overt example by the way.
If the young fella on the right had blonde hair, and a red ball in his hand, what would he be daring to draw from behind the curtain of red covering the youth on the left? Surely this would have to do with whether his narcissism was benevolent or malevolent, whether he wanted to draw something forth only for himself, or for the benefit of the other(‘s confidence) or for both of them for the usual reason…
The boys do not even seem to be discussing. They are watching, weighing, waiting to see where the action of the next toss will lead them. The young girl in the center has her hands in her mouth, swallowing her fingers as she feels around her mouth which surely may be making a gurgling choking sound, but at least she has the sense to put an end to thoughtless dribble, for, does she know, it would most likely not enlighten the turtle to peek its head out and see what is really involved in the world around him.
Nope, words only won’t do. One also needs something sensual, a something similar to oneself.
No doubt, that little mark made by Matisse, that bit of red in that girls hand, that swatch of paint sitting there on the surface of this weird image, that tiny little hardly what one would see as important bit of action…that is part of a painting that, though following the formal triad composition of three figures, and with calming greens and blues that remind us that most of the world is blue, is a painting with a red turtle and red treat and is, as a work of art, stimulating in the sense that we can share that we sometimes poke our heads out at things that are most similar to us. We are red attracting red. (Tongue; lips…)(Fingernails, he kisses every finger of her hand; she puts her tongue in his mouth.)
That red might not be pretty to us, but the painting sure is.
A butterfly floats among the trees in the jungle. It knows the perfectly red flower is there. If finds it and disappears from view into a red fleshy petal on which it sits, invisible in plain view, out of sight without being hidden, within and concealed by the color that most turns it on. It is reluctant to leave when the time comes.
Suppose it could be that the paintings are read in the following way:
The ladies seem to be able to get the thing out of its shell, the boys are in competition… could be turtles and not balls; they do not seem to mind either way. In the girls the three identify with one (but I would suspect that if it were to turn into a handsome prince these girls would get beastly. look at the already eager and anticipatory look on the face of the girl who is standing), while the boys each identify with their own object for the game.
But it leaves us with that. Boys and girls and arguing about who deserves what.
The butterfly doesn’t care about deserving. It’s just hot for the flower, and determined. It’s not interested in arguing either. The jungle’s not a nice beach. It’s more colorful, more intense. A butterfly’s almost as far as you can get from a tortoise. A butterfly can’t afford to be cautious because it doesn’t have a shell. No one ever talked about a tortoise that left you breathless except maybe another tortoise.
In Matisse intensity is usually or at least often a form of mock simplicity. Matisse draws out and flattens the composition of the landscape. Three lines run behind the figures. Three figures, typical of painting studies of figures, and three lines, typical of landscape (foreground, middle ground, background). He puts the threes in play and says “so what?” the action of the painting is what is going on in the fleshy brushy surface, not in reading threes. The expressions are fleshy, and on the girl a bit scary. The tits and bellies are rounded fleshy mounds, as is the ass, and the toes. Could be Matisse pointing to us that what gets us to be into the work are these active qualities of the skin of the painting. All the sexual innuendos, if there are any, and sure they are in there, hit us with a timid laughter given what we are able to imagine to be the symbolic parts of these two paintings of three figures and three division in space, and two singular red things (from beneath only one of which a head pokes out?)
So you see, we can imagine it, just as he could. Or maybe we can only imagine that we can imagine it just as he could, but that’s just as good. We can feel the skin just as he could and compare it to the water and the grass, the one wet the other just this side of prickly and of course to be compared to the hair which everywhere except in the case of the blonde and the girl who’s eating and looks kind of like a cave man is actually smooth like the balls and the back of the tortoise while the flesh, curiously loose on the bodies, calls forth its difference from water and air. And we could care less what the work is saying, what its discourse of boys and girls is, if we can laugh at and feel what is actively happening, visually and in imagery, we are out of the discourse of boys and girls perhaps and on our way to the discourse of children. Where the arguments are savage but not fatal, and half of them just playing at arguments. Maybe. It seems quite gentle. Nothing is stirred up.
Objects perceived based on color content become not isolated but seen participating in a world invented by a sense of a totality of that world, through the imagination. In Matisse we are in a world of color where we can learn, like children, to see and not be ashamed, reflect and not prescribe an order to things. Everyone sits or stands or squats without tension except of a relaxed and athletic sort. Very classical. End of a summer afternoon stuff. Limpidity of the mind, she’s not looking at the tortoise because she’s day-dreaming. The boy is only half thinking about his feet. The other half is thoughts about things he is only half aware one has thoughts about. He already realizes they’re not quite thoughts. He knows for sure that they’re about her. In the painting we see both an after and a before, always on the brink of exhaustion but never at that point where one totally forgets that world and everything else. Everything else being before before and after after thousands of times over till it’s just pure sensation causing ideas to become so jumbled that they cannot remain anything decisive. I don’t know where climax is in this, or if it is everywhere.
Barthes once said that the small death was how one should experience literature. You turn pages when you read from a paperback book, either remembering or forgetting what came before and moving, sequentially, from one narrative to the other, back and forth in a space that keeps referring to itself yet forgetting itself in the thoughts that arise from the darkened letterforms on the page. The after informs the before and vice versa through an entire book, until it’s closed. The book of letters can be closed, though thoughts of it may remain. However, we presuppose an end to the process of turning pages…
Where does a painting end? Touching and seeing in intercourse happens all over the surface. A painting is all surface, touching and narrations happening everywhere all at once.
What is most fleetingly sensible about the surface of a canvas is the flighty activity of color. Its position(s) are made believable only by those others happening around it. No color has any particular single heavy-handed motivation. Walter Benjamin said “Color is single, not as a lifeless thing and a rigid individuality but as a winged creature that flits from one form to the next.”[1] He also said that children are excited by soap bubbles because they shimmer, moving in and out of forms in subtle shifting nuances, dissolving the total object into a series of moments.
So in color, a griffin, a fairy, a dusk or a dawn are all at once but only as a circumstance.
In Goya’s painting the blind-folded boy ducking away from the other blind-folded boy’s bat must only be able to keep from being knocked down because he is engaged in movement, pulled and directed from both sides (oh the tender touches of this lad’s firmly but softly gripped fleshy hands! Is it like the way the clouds are touching the sky or more like that in which the same clouds are cupped between the hills, a vapor between mounds which it softens even as they provisionally contain it?) and through which he can get a sense of what is there but cannot be seen. We, as witness to this, with them frolic gaily in a space blanched white before the heat of the sun, in an oval formation mimicked by the possibly quite cool lake. They dash madly or stand, blue and yellow responding to one another, red vibrating with intensity in itself, colors tickling that something that reminds us of our generous ability to comprehend that we cannot possibly comprehend it all. At one end, the beginning, a dress that stands. At the other one that moves almost as fast as the moving, dodging, crouching boy. In the middle moving only slightly a dress whiter than the other two, but topped with red… And the two most fragile details the feather in the woman’s hat across from the girl whose blouse is red, which find their echo in the few leaves at the upper right, which move horizontally out into the painting to complement the feathers’ vertical assertion of where the center of the painting is, and we wonder if the girl in the red blouse is looking at the man next to the woman with the feather. For his part he holds the woman’s left hand but is looking at the girl, across the dividing line between who moves most and who moves least, and his movements match hers, or possibly it’s hers which correspond to his. Or maybe both are mutually involved in a dance of their own which anchors in its provisionality the playful drama at whose center it is, or which it might even be said to frame in another kind of dance.
The dance is fastest on the right, where sentences end. Its participants’ goal the same as ours, to enable it to release sufficient energy to precipitate its dissolution in that totality that is defined by circling the sun while caught in movements whose explicitness obscures those that are smaller but even more rapid, like the movements of eyes. The guy to the right of the woman with the feather is looking at the girl in the red blouse too. It’s no accident that she’s at the centre. This is surely made clear by the fact that the man who holds her left hand leans away, for frame the glance of the man holding the feather hat lady’s right hand, while the crouching but moving boy clears the way for us to see quite clearly what’s going on between the girl and the man across from her. And the tree stabilizes and ends the drama by leaning out, matching exactly in its stability the rapidly moving girl next to it, but towards the top leaning back in, whose (or what couple even) does it match as it reaches the top of the painting, where it really ends, in the upper right. And just what are those two rocks doing, suggestive as they are given what’s going on? And then we notice that the brightest part of the sky is also at the center, its gaseous luminosity matched by the water, and exceeded by the lacy folds of the almost weightless skirt and pale hair of the girl in the red blouse. What does red reach out to here? It certainly seems to indicate that something’s happening at the center of the painting that could precipitate the collapse of movement into a gaze that might even make the fastest movement seem quite slow. Because it’s quite true that decisive moments cause even the fastest movement to become the container and embodiment of slow motion. Transfixing within extreme and wild cavorting, dancing feet and crazy crouching overcome by the imperceptible movements of clouds, let alone of moving around the sun, dissolution in a totality which is more than painting’s, in Goya just as in Bridget Riley. Because it’s totality without finality, duration, acceleration, concentration, improvisation, chance, hit on the head with a bat if you’re not careful and lucky, head knocked off by a girl in a red blouse if you’re carelessly attentive and really, really lucky.
Dancing with the steps untraceable, swallowing in depths of oceans and skies never as imaginable as they are in a painting and from whence it can be seen how very much more there is to jump in tune with and behold. The earth moves around the sun and this makes all that is visible visible in the most various kinds of ways. Painting is a recollection of what we are doing when not thinking about it: engaging an experience that has little to do with control, and more about being open to not caring about control. What a susceptible sensitivity to aesthetic maturity this brings out. Triviality absolved when all seriousness is given free range to at once assert and evaporate itself in its opposite. Oh the sensation of this as it brushes against flesh! Brushing her being a kind of grasping that involves no violence, least of all violent possession except that it possesses everything by becoming so suddenly a memory. Memory being a totality that keeps changing under its own weight, maybe.
[1] Benjamin, Walter, ‘A child’s View of Colour’ (1914-15, formerly unpublished0, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) 50-1.
[2] Bridget Riley, in an interview with Robert Kudieka in 1972, has this to say about her series Circles Colour Structure Studies (1970-71): “I have always tried to avoid « colouring forms ». I want to create a colour-form, not coloured forms. It is very important that each form finally relinquishes its separateness in the whole. It must be fully absorbed. So while it is necessary in the early stages to analyze each unit, my aim is to enable it to release sufficient energy to precipitate its dissolution in totality.”
