Hot and Cold

Two points, one at the top and one at the bottom, and every line in the piece comes out of one or the other. Blues and whites fan down from above, reds and yellows rise up from below, and they meet in the middle where neither has the upper hand. That’s the whole structure. Everything else is a consequence of it.

Colour does more work here than in anything else I’ve made. Cold at one end and warm at the other, so the two halves read as different states before you’ve looked at anything else — though I made it so it could hang either way up. Which end is the heat and which is the cold is up to whoever owns it. It isn’t a landscape and I’d rather it didn’t settle into being one.

The middle is the part I was after. Lines from both directions overlapping and interweaving, blue crossing red, white cutting through yellow, none of them stopping at the boundary. Where two colours that don’t belong together collide the eye keeps catching on it, and the pattern that emerges through the middle band was not something I could have drawn deliberately. It came out of the two fans running into each other.

This one existed first in the year-long sketchbook, in red and black only, small. As soon as I began the painting I could see it was going to work — the idea was already sound, it just needed colour and scale to show what it had in it. I’ve since made a larger version on wooden board.

That’s how most of this series goes. Set something simple in motion — two origin points, warm against cold, lines that aren’t allowed to stop — and the rule turns out to contain far more than you could read off it. You find out what’s there by making it.