The Red Line
On black, cream and rust, the alchemists' four colours and why you never fully arrive
Most of my paintings begin in the dark. Not only in the way that sounds, although that too, but because I am an early riser and before I paint I walk, sometimes scrambling up parts of the Cotswold Way while the world is still asleep. At this time of year the paths are black when I set out, the stone walls only coming into view as the light comes up behind them. It is my time and I go as much for the colours as for anything else. By the time I reach the studio the walls have turned the colour I spend most of my days trying to mix: a warm, slightly blushed cream that I have never once managed to buy in a tube.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out why that colour felt so familiar. Cotswold stone gets its honey warmth from iron oxide, which is also what sits in the tube of red oxide I use for the rust that bleeds out from under my black blocks. The walls I walk past and the stain I paint are, chemically, close relatives, the same mineral seen at different strengths, and I suspect I had been painting the landscape for years without noticing I was doing it.
There is a red line in almost everything I make. It runs alongside a black block or drops from a bar, it stops short of the edge and it is usually the last thing I put down, one decisive line taped and pulled while the paint is still wet. For a long time I couldn't have told you what it meant, only that a painting without it felt unfinished, as though nothing in it was holding the rest in balance.
It was a conversation about my branding that sent me back to the alchemists and gave me the language for it.
The four colours
The alchemists called their project the Great Work and they described it in colours. It began with the nigredo, the blackening, in which the raw material was broken down and the practitioner had to face what had been kept in the dark. Then came the albedo, the whitening, the first light after the darkness, followed by the citrinitas, the yellowing, a kind of dawning in which things begin to move toward wholeness. The work ended in the rubedo, the reddening, in which everything that had been separated was brought back together into something that could not have existed before the process began.
Jung spent much of his later life reading these texts and he came to see the stages less as recipes for gold than as a map of psychological change, which is perhaps why they landed so squarely with me. I sit with people in the nigredo every week and I know how much of the work happens there, in the breaking down, long before anything resembling light arrives.
When I looked at my paintings with those four colours in mind, I realised they were all already there. The black blocks are never simply black but built from layers of other colours, cool and warm, dragged on with a knife and scratched into while they are still wet. The cream grounds are glazed and wiped back again and again until they look lived in. The ochre and rust seep out from underneath, as if something below the surface has been slowly rising. And then there is the red line, which I now think of as the rubedo: the integration, the thing that holds everything else in relation.
Solve et coagula
If the story ended there it would be a tidy one, but the alchemists never did the work once. Their instruction was solve et coagula, dissolve and bind, and then dissolve again, so that every red became the raw material for the next black and the whole process began over, a little further on.
I find that enormously reassuring, both in the studio and outside it. You never fully arrive. Every integration you manage, however hard won, becomes the ground for the next turning and the next piece of work, which is not a failure of the process but the shape of it. If anything it looks less like a circle than a spiral, returning to the same places at a slightly wider radius each time.
I feel it most at the edges of the day. Dawn and sunset are times of transition, when the light is neither one thing nor the other and everything seems briefly possible, and they are when I feel most alive, as though there is no limit and no ceiling to what might come next.
This autumn I finished two paintings that I think of as a pair. In one, the red line rises out of a heavy black block, with colour tearing through the top of it, and carries on up into the open cream. In the other, the line drops down from a dark beam and stops well short of the bottom edge. I didn't plan it this way, but when I stood them side by side I could see that one was about coming out and the other about going back in, and that both belong to the same work.
The thread
So this is what the red line has come to mean to me. It is the thread that runs from one painting to the next and, if I am honest, from one turn of a life to the next, through the black and the cream and the rust and out the other side. It doesn't promise that you will arrive anywhere in particular. It only promises that there is a way through and that you are not doing it for the first time.
For a long time I thought the red line was where a painting ended and it has taken me longer than I would like to admit to see that it is really where the next one begins.
