Shed Reds

Paintings are messers with minds of their own. You bring them somewhere, tell them to stay, and then they change direction and become something completely different. They can be stubborn, unhelpful, unyielding, sometimes shy, sometimes grandiose, often self-destructive. 

Listening to Tom Waits’ “Orphans” (some sounds of which he made with crude objects in his shed at the end of the garden) I am trying to re-create a randomness of colour by mixing the oil paint combinations differently than I normally would. Surprisingly I didn't find this easy. I used lemon yellows, magenta, Naples yellow and titanium white and got these unusual reddish hues. I think they are like skanky “Shed Reds”, something you would find in the leftover paints of an old man’s shed. I was on the right track. 

Looking at the images now while I am writing this I'm thinking maybe my T-shirt influenced the red colour of the painting, I’ll never know.