“In one article I wrote about Jan's works I noted that he tended to favour sunset scenes, the end of days or seasons: images of thanksgiving. So I asked him one time why so many sunsets? ‘How else can you get so much red into a painting?’
I learned from that!”
“When the white paintings came out I was just knocked out by them. Although when I saw, tonight coming in, that red painting: I have to say I would like to walk right out with it now! I really think that red painting is something else.”
- Adrienne Clarkson, Tribute to Ron Bloore 2009, Royal Ontario Museum
Our eyes evolved to be more sensitive to greens than to any other colour. Our world is mostly green. Our eyes are most attuned to things not green, because food and threats, apples and snakes, tend not to be green. Red is a bowl of cherries. Yellow could be a tiger. Green means go, nothing to see here. So there is not much use of green in painting generally except to set off something else.
“I like a guy who can give me the imagination to think that the sky is gold. Gold.
I don't want Giotto to tell me the sky is blue. I mean this is an insult to my intelligence. I go outside and I see under normal circumstances the sky looks blue. I don’t need that. I don’t need somebody to replicate my daily experience.”
1981, Three Scythian Stags on black silk, Estate Collection
Colourful Works
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