Red Threat

The title says red, and the face is red, but the bull would not notice. Cattle are dichromats. Their eyes have two kinds of color-sensing cones, tuned to blue-violet and yellow-green, and lack the third cone that lets people tell red from green.

That is why the matador's red cape is for the crowd. The television show MythBusters once sent bulls at three dummies dressed in red, blue and white, and the animals charged with no preference for red. What sets a bull off is movement.

So the red in this painting is aimed at you, not the animal. The bull comes straight down the canvas toward you, head low, horns swept up and out in thick strokes of cream and gold. The face is built from patches of red and orange over black, with turquoise in the cheeks and brow and two small glinting eyes. The body behind is mostly shadow and blue.

Around him the ground breaks into yellow and orange, as if he were kicking up a sunlit field, against turquoise. The paint is laid on flat and broken, the way a palette knife leaves it, so the animal looks assembled from color rather than drawn. It needs a big wall: a den, an office, a bar.