I'm colorblind. Just a little bit. I have a hard time differentiating between reds and greens. When there's a lot of both, I can tell that there are two colors present if I strain myself to look at only particular points, but looking at the whole they blend together. It's impacted me a lot when looking at art in the past, but this piece is all red and still evokes that frustrating feeling of having to strain to see colors.

I was mad about it until my color-abled friend expressed the same frustration. I explained to her that this is what I feel like every time she and her roommates draw something in red and green to mess with me.

Suddenly I had a new appreciation of the piece. It let me relate to a friend how it actually felt to be colorblind. Frustrating, but if you don't really focus on it, you don't notice. At a passing glance, Red Painting can just look like a red canvas, just like colorblind tests look like a mess of circles to me.

So I decided to use this painting. Watching it for an extended period of time was interesting. After a really long time, I found that differentiating the colors was easier, once I knew what to look for, but staring at the center of it still always gave me that almost radiating view of the same color blended everywhere, with a feeling in the back of my head that there was something more that I couldn't see. My friend stayed with me while I watched for a while, but I'm pretty sure she found it frustrating. I'd like to think that my past experience with frustration helped my patience. The more I stared at it the more I wondered why he picked the shapes that he did, but try as I might, I couldn't find any meaning behind them. It didn't help that there was no description of the piece on its nameplate.

After half an hour, I was pretty blurry-eyed to it too, but more than anything I really appreciated that I now had a way for my friend to relate to me, so I made this: