Red Shoes, and Black and White

I saw an interesting show yesterday: one of the artists in my studio, Taravat Talepasand -- who's work I coincidentally reviewed a few years ago when I wrote for Whitehot Magazine -- has a show of drawings up at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts here in San Francisco. They are meticulously-rendered pencil drawings of her family, of women, and of other subjects relating to her Iranian-American upbringing. The drawing that caught my eye was a younger-looking self-portrait of her in between two other women, all dressed in traditional flowering robes covering everything but their faces. Her robe is pulled up just enough to reveal a pair of bright-red shoes: bright red in a field of black and white and grey. It's a serene and innocent drawing -- really touching -- and in its simplicity and directness more powerful than the complicated and sometimes violent images nearby.

Taravat Talepasand, Traditions are as Followed, graphite and watercolor, 40 x 30 inches

When I was little I had a pair of red shoes that my grandpa gave me one summer when we were visiting, and I loved them so much I refused to take them off. I actually slept with them on. Red shoes, can there be anything more delightful and childlike? Taravat said she brought her red shoes to Iran against her mother's admonition, and you can see the sheepishness and the giddy defiance in this drawing, even as she takes comfort and security from her companions on either side. She compared her red shoes to Dorothy's red shoes in the Wizard of Oz -- a classic and one of the few American movies I saw when I was growing up in Finland. Dorothy is an innocent girl struggling to make her way through a strange dream. She walks down the yellow-brick road arm in arm with her friends, just like in this drawing. The movie Schindler's List also makes use of a little girl's red shoes, but here there is no waking up from the nightmare and the shoes are heart-breaking.

Red is a powerful color. For a child it is delightful: red like the strawberries in my first garden, red like my first tricycle, red like the plastic fire-man hats I'd get with my grandpa when we stopped to say hi to the firemen in the station. For grown-ups, red is the color of anger. We turn red with rage and embarrassment, we bleed red. We pay attention to red, to "red flags" and to red traffic lights. Red is the color of passion, the color of lipstick and nail polish, the color of all things sexy and female. Someone told me that my red jeans are feminine, but I like them all the same.

Schindler's List, the Wizard of Oz, and Taravat's drawing all make use of this really simple and really effective formula: In a field of black and white, add color, especially red. The contrast of color against non-color infers a contrast in time, in mind-set, and in state of being. The South African artist William Kentridge uses lines of red and tinges of blue to enormous success in his stark charcaoal drawings and animated films, and I have also tried it in some earlier charcoal drawings. Old Soviet propaganda posters use the same colors. It even reminds me of the African Sahel, where the landscape is dry and dusty and monochrome, but where the people wear the loudest, most colorful patterns you've ever seen.

When I was studying anthropology, I came across an article about the linguistics of color. In a survey of world languages -- picture thousands of languages from tribes and villages across the world -- the authors discovered there was a system to the way people describe color. Modern languages like English have a vast number of color terms: red is everything from burgundy to vermillion to scarlet, and if you check your crayola crayons or the paint swatches at the hardware store, the terms are almost endless. Other languages have fewer terms, and some languages only have two. In these languages, everything in the world is either black or white. Other languages only have three terms: In these languages everything is either black, white, or red. Things are never black, white, and blue, or black, white, and yellow: red is always the third color. The system continues like this: Languages that have four color terms always have black, white, red, and now I forget if it's blue or green. Languages with five terms have the earlier four plus one more. Really strange, but there is a color hierarchy...and black, white, and red are at the top.

Taravat Talepasand: Drawings

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, through June 20.