Naja. There is a tube of genuine cadmium red on the shelf and I have not touched it in three weeks. Not because of the price, though at 74 euro it is not nothing.

The problem is the last time I opened one. I had a big canvas, 190 by 160, three months of work under it, greys and ochres and a cold green I was happy with. And I put that red into the middle of it. One stroke, honestly. Not even a large one. It was like someone turned a light on in a room where I had been living quietly in the dark, and the whole painting was suddenly about that one spot. Everything I had built up went quiet behind it. I scraped it back the next morning and it took me a week to get the surface back to something I could look at.

So now the new tube sits there. I know what it would do. I am just not sure I want the painting to be that loud yet.

It is a strange thing, that a colour can have that much authority over a picture. I spent twenty years learning to make greys do the work. And one red still knows better than I do.

Anyway. It stays closed a while longer.