For a long time I kept red at arm’s length. It’s loud. It takes over a canvas before you’ve decided to let it. Then one evening the light came through the window the color of a struck match, and I painted Crimson Hover almost without thinking — a hummingbird holding still inside all that heat.
What I learned is that red isn’t loud, exactly. It’s insistent. It asks you to mean it. You can’t be tentative with a color like that; it punishes hesitation. So you commit, the bird arrives, and the whole canvas finally has a pulse.
This is the painting where I stopped apologizing.
