When I was a kid I had Scarlet Fever. I don’t remember how old I was, but I do remember that I was in my bed and I was dreaming about this red dot. It really wasn’t a dream, it was more like a vision. I asked Mom if that’s why they call it Scarlet Fever. It took me a while to explain to her that I was talking about this red dot that I was seeing.

Today’s experiment

I started the sketch today with a red dot in the upper left corner of my paper. I spent a lot of time looking at it. I thought of how it looked in relation to the rest of the paper; how it was red and, as a warm color, it would appear to come forward; how I could ‘sculpt’ the space around it using cooler colors to make it appear as if it were the tip of a mountain. I was trying to use Hans Hofmann‘s concept of push/pull, as I understood them.

I decided to paint a strip of color leading away from the dot, beginning with red and fading into blue. I was hoping that this would be the first cut with my sculpting tool: the paint brush. I wanted that strip to recede into the distance. So I pre-wet the paper and began. The strip began to look like a fish, so I enlarged the red tail and made it surround the dot.

Underneath the ‘fish’ I drew darkness – using a heavy saturation of blue, red, and some yellow. I wanted red to echo in this darkness. I drew away some of the liquid in the dark patch and drew a brush saturated with red across. I loved watching the red blooms as they happened. (I felt a little like ‘Mac the Knife’, watching the ‘scarlet billows’ appear.)

As I continued, I saw that the fish tail needed to become a hand and the dark underside needed to be angrier.

Here is my first rendition of the idea of my Scarlet Fever, implemented perhaps 50+ years after I had it.

Scarlet Fever
9″x12″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block