Red’s been my top color for the past couple of years. My favorite color tends to change with my season of life and the past few years have brought red to the forefront.
I found an awesome red sweatshirt at Fremont Vintage Mall in 2020. It says ‘Enjoy Skagit Valley’ in the old CocaCola logo style. Skagit County is an agricultural area about an hour north of Seattle. I used to work up there and driving to work through the marshy farmlands and tulip fields was a daily color experience.
I soon added a pair of red sweatpants to my wardrobe so I could go full tilt, head to toe red. Undoubtably this is one of the reasons why my partner tells me I dress like a rapper- a compliment that I accept with great pride.
My affinity for red is so strong that I made my logo a red square. Of course, I went with a square as so much of my work is based on square blocks. Much of my inspiration comes from quilt squares, specifically the log cabin quilt where the red center square signifies the hearth of the home. I love designing new patterns and color stories by starting with a red square and building out from there.
The two artworks above (left, Red Curves by Ellsworth Kelly and right, a close up of Raqqa II by Frank Stella) are two pieces that had great influence on me while searching for my artist voice. Raqqa II has been on display at the NC Museum of Art since I was a child. It’s a massive canvas that used to live at the bottom of a staircase in an area that’s open three stories up. It makes a big, colorful statement in a vast space and I can remember it catching my attention time and time again as a child.
The Ellsworth Kelly piece I came across in 2021 when I visited SFMOMA for my birthday. At that time I had been trying to find just the right form of creative expression for a few years. A lot of my creative journey has been a struggle of editing. I like it all, but have trouble deciding what I really love. I had been attemping to strip away details to find something more streamlined, more targeted, less fanciful and less cluttered. Seeing Ellsworth Kelly’s giant color statements took my breath away. I was struggling with putting together these four and five hue color stories that always turned out to be too much, too busy. These sculptures by Kelly suggested to me that one color might be enough. I started experimenting with single color pieces and fell in love with the idea of creating a large, one color square that can stand alone. Sometimes we need to see things to know they’re possible and for me, simplicity is something that I needed demonstrated.
A couple of other favorite red shots from my reel are the three above. The middle one is an Indonesian ikat textile that I saw at the Seattle Art Museum at their ikat exhibit (another birthday art museum trip, yes you see a pattern there). The other two are street photos from Indonesia where I lived from 2015-2017. I love SE Asian scooter culture. Everyone has a scooter and is unafraid of packing it to the gills with balloons, food, people, etc. I also love kaki limas (small, rolling food carts) especially the tofu ones. This one is round tofu balls that are deep fried and usually come with different fillings. My pick was always tahu isi which is the cabbage filled version.
This being the first of my blog posts on this platform, I’m not sure who will be out there reading this. If you’ve made it this far, I’d be over the moon if you left a comment below. I’d love to know how your impressions of red! Or what you enjoyed about this article or how you found me. Just say hello. I’m listening.