Three Colours Red

After several false starts, this still life painting of a dead partridge turned out OK in the end. My main problem initially was the composition. I was given a brace of birds and first strung them up together from their necks – basically how they were handed to me. I just couldn’t make the shapes work in an interesting, balanced and pleasing way though. After a couple of days I gave up. I also felt sure that I had run out of time to do anything else and was expecting them to bloat and smell. It seemed such a waste to not make anything at all of them though, so I tried some different arrangements, liked this and got straight to work. I guess it shows how important the right composition is (sounds obvious, I know) because this one flowed from the very start.

I wanted it to remain painterly and expressive. Indeed the challenge was knowing when to stop as every stroke tightened the marks and risked going too far. There are a couple of areas that I could have left alone just a little bit earlier than I did, allowing the textures to remain ambiguous and slightly undefined. All in all though, a good day’s work.

Spending time studying a once living creature has a weight to it that can’t fail to be felt by someone sensitive to such things. I called it ‘Three Colours Red’ as a reference to the three red pigments used in the key areas of legs, beak and drops of dried blood – Earth Red, Vermillion and Alizarin Crimson. It also made me think of the line “Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw”, from the poem ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ by the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. A train of thought that became a meditation on the violence of nature (humanity), and the arbitrariness of life and death.

It is not a reference to the Three Colours Trilogy of films.