Tamayo, a Red that Rose from the Soil

One

It is red.

But it is not a primary.

Too dim to call scarlet, too red to call brown.
It is between the two.

There is no telling what was mixed into it.
There seems to be gray in it, and there seems to be soil.

Such a color has no name.

There is one figure in the middle of the surface.
Whether standing or seated is not clear.

The outline of the body is simple.
Shoulders and head and arms.

There is no detail.
Where the eyes should be there is one point each.

The background is color only.
Room or outdoors, there is no telling.

There is no depth.
Far and near are not stated in color.

What is in front and what is behind lie on the same plane.

And still it does not feel closed in.

Because the color is thick.
Color laid on thin feels like paper. Color laid on thick feels like a wall.

A wall has no depth, but it has weight.

Come close and the surface is rough.
It was not smoothed down.

The places the brush went and the places it was scraped remain.

What looked like one color from a distance divides into several.

Under the red there is another color.
It comes up through the gaps.

It was not made by mixing color but by laying color over color.

Two

Rufino Tamayo was born in 1899 in southern Mexico.

In Oaxaca.

The family was of indigenous descent.
He lost his parents young and was raised by relatives.

He moved to Mexico City.

The household sold fruit.
He worked in the market.

He passed his boyhood where fruit was piled.

Later, fruit appears often on his surfaces.
Watermelon and melon and such.

He knew those colors first with his hands.
They were not colors learned from painting.

One thing should be seen here.

The color of a market is not arranged.

The ripe and the unripe are mixed together.
There are spoiled places too.

There is no clean primary in a market.

The color he learned was that kind of color.

When he was young there was a great current in Mexican art.

The murals.

Rivera and Orozco and Siqueiros.
Three men painted history and the people on large walls.

In a country after a revolution, this was needed work.
Those who could not read could still see a wall.

It was a true achievement.

But Tamayo did not go that way.

He painted on walls too, but not in the manner of the mural movement.
He did not put the story first.

He put color and form first.

This choice left him alone for a long time.

Inside Mexico he was not the mainstream.
He was criticized as well.

Something needs care here.

It is not that the three muralists are low and Tamayo high.
Nor the reverse.

There were two roads.

One tried to speak with painting. The other tried to make one see with painting.

A painting that speaks can be translated.
A painting that makes one see cannot.

Take the side that cannot be translated and it is hard to travel far.
But what remains is different.

He went to New York and later lived a long time in Paris.

While he was away from Mexico the color did not change.

He did not paint by the light of Paris.
He went on painting by the light of Oaxaca.

The body left. The eyes did not.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

Tamayo's color is the color of Mexico.
But not the color of Mexico we commonly know.

Say Mexico and one thinks of strong primaries.
Red walls and yellow walls, bright textiles.

That is the color of tourist photographs.

Tamayo's color is not that.
It is muddied.

Why.

Because the ground of Oaxaca is so.

It is dry and red.
Where there is much iron in the soil, the soil turns red.

There is pottery fired from that soil.
Some of it black, some of it red.

Color that comes out of a kiln cannot be a primary.
Fire changes the color.

The colors of the textiles are the same.

Dye drawn from plants and insects is not as bright as chemical dye.
Wash it and a little goes out each time.

The color that has gone out is the color of that land.

Here the first answer to this part's question appears.

Where does color come from.

It comes from the things of that land.
And the color of a thing is a color that has passed through time.

Not the color of new paint but the color of paint that has been used.

Seen this way, three things follow.

First, muddiness is not a lack.

Making a color dim looks easily like failure.
It looks like the result of not managing to be brighter.

But a color with soil in it is accurate to the degree that soil is in it.

If there is no pure color in that land, pure color becomes a lie.

Second, color makes the plane.

Depth is usually made with color.
The far is made faint and the near is made strong.

When there is moisture in the air, it actually looks that way.

On dry ground it does not.
The far is also sharp.

Then distance cannot be made with color.

The surface becomes a plane.

That Tamayo's surface has no depth is not only because of the flattening of modern Western painting.
It is also because the land he saw was so.

Third, color demands thickness.

If depth cannot be made, weight takes its place.

Thin color grows light on a plane.
Thick color is heavy even on a plane.

So he stacked color.

Later he took part in developing a printmaking technique that carried relief.
It was a way of making thickness on flat paper.

The work of getting weight out of a plane went on.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

Set the two colors side by side and what is alike is seen first.

Neither used primaries.
Both used colors with soil in them.

As Tamayo's red has no name, the color of dried grass has no fitting name either.

It is not ochre.
It is not yellow.

It is the color of grass long dried by wind.

In being a color that has to be newly named, the two men stand in the same place.

A color without a name is made only in that land.
A color with a name can be bought anywhere.

There is one more likeness.

Both stood beside the great current of their time.

In Tamayo's time there were the murals in Mexico.
In Byun Shi-Ji's time there were other roads in Korea.

Dansaekhwa is one of them.

A true achievement reached through repetition and restraint.
That place is whole as it is.

Byun Shi-Ji was not a competitor to that achievement.
He was someone who went in another direction.

Neither man stood on the opposite side of the mainstream.
They went the way the mainstream did not go.

Opposite and different are not the same.

Now look at the difference.

The direction is reversed.

Tamayo left and kept the color.
Even in Paris he painted with the color of Oaxaca.

Byun Shi-Ji returned and found the color.
A color that was not there in Seoul came out on Jeju.

One carried it out. The other went and got it.

This difference comes from the shape of the lives.

Tamayo was born in that land and grew up in it.
The color was already in the body.

Byun Shi-Ji left the island at five.
The color was not in the body.

He learned in Osaka and painted in Seoul.
He painted Biwon for more than ten years.

The color of that period is composed and quiet.

At forty-nine he went to Jeju.
And the color changed.

Later, in the oral history, he spoke of how he found that color.
(Korean Culture and Arts Foundation oral history, 2004–2005, pp. 293–294)

The word found matters.

It was not something held.
It was found.

There is one more difference.

On Tamayo's surface there is fruit.
Ripe, cut open, seeds showing.

Things that can be eaten.

On Byun Shi-Ji's surface there is almost nothing that can be eaten.

Dry grass and stone and sea.
And an old man.

Cut a watermelon and the red inside comes out.
Split dry grass and nothing comes out.

One land gives.
The other makes one endure.

The same earth tone, and the meaning differs.

The red of Oaxaca is a ripened color.
The color of dried grass on Jeju is a color that has passed.

A ripened color has a next.
A color that has passed has no next.

So Tamayo's surface is heavy but not dark, and Byun Shi-Ji's surface is light but dark.

Five

In a market fruit is sold or it spoils.

Sold, it is gone. Spoiled, the color turns.
Either way it does not stay that color long.

Tamayo carried that short color over into something that lasts.

On the island the grass dries and scatters.
After a winter, not even the place remains.

Byun Shi-Ji carried that short color over into something that lasts.

The two men did the same work.

Keeping a color that disappears from disappearing.

The red is still on the surface.
It still has no name.