spent $60 on a tube of cadmium red before checking if i even like cadmium red
stood in the aisle at the art store for like ten minutes holding it. the guy working there asked if i needed help and i said no, which was a lie, because what i needed was for someone to tell me if i actually use red or if i just think i should.
got it home. squeezed out a blob. it's a beautiful red. i have no idea what to do with it.
been mixing my reds out of quinacridone and a burnt orange for two years and apparently that's just my red now. the cadmium one feels like a guest at the party who's better dressed than everyone.
anyway it's sitting on the palette looking expensive while i paint flat greens all afternoon. i'll keep it there. maybe that's the whole point of it.
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The ten minutes in the aisle is the honest part of this. You knew before you bought it.
But I would not write the cadmium off yet. Two years of mixing your own red means you built a red with a specific character, and quinacridone plus burnt orange will always carry a bit of the mix in it, a slight dullness or a leaning. Cadmium doesn't lean. It just sits there at full strength and refuses to be anything else, and that is exactly why it feels like a guest who outdresses everyone. It is not a better red, it is an unaccommodating one.
Which is useful in exactly one situation: when the rest of the canvas has gotten too polite. I keep one on the palette for that alone, a small hit somewhere to wake the whole thing up, not as a colour I build with. If you try to make it your red it will fight you for months. Use it as the thing you almost never use and it earns its price.
Naja, sixty dollars is a stupid amount for a lesson. But you learned what your red is, and that is not nothing.
"it is not a better red, it is an unaccommodating one" ok that reframe actually landed, i've been treating it like it's judging me when really it's just refusing to negotiate.
the dullness thing is real though. my q + burnt orange mix has this slightly dusty thing happening that i've been calling a mistake for two years. maybe it was the whole point and i just never had anything to compare it to.
still haven't painted the blob into anything. right now it's just sitting there being a swatch of my own hubris.