Wednesday is Cobalt Blue, Friday is Cadmium Red

Flat, lifeless paintings, ineffective eye-sores, and vague explorations into femininity, the body, and the landscape, make up ‘Wednesday is Cobalt Blue, Friday is Cadmium Red’. After 30 years of absence, Ainsley’s return to exhibiting in Glasgow is hailed in the show's reviews. Many of these focus more on that, or the fact that she's still making work at 74, than any of the work itself, but after seeing the exhibition this is unsurprising. 

The paintings are all dead and still, they fail to become organic, to capture the body, and instead are exaggerated as objects. None of them feel any better to see in person either, appearing just as good if not better in photographs, where their traits are exaggerated. The tapestries suffer from a similar problem, and fail to offer any real difference or highlight to their character other than the lack of a rectangular canvas. This situates the paintings as not quite paintings, and the tapestries as not quite tapestries, neither metamorphosize or transform, create something new or exaggerate their effective elements, they just awkwardly sit on the walls. The links showing the way both blood and water move between these, the divisions of the cells, the skin, the human, and the landscape are not lost on me, they just feel ineffective. The organic and human elements of the show feel as though they’ve been killed, barely showing what they are meant to, and underwhelming when they do. But alongside this is the major problem that there are very few ways to interpret these paintings. 

The use of colour, emphasised in many works titles, is less bold than I’d imagined. The show fails at making its own language through colour, nor does it focus on colour in any overwhelming way. Historical and political implications of the specific pigments mentioned seem startlingly absent or distant. The largely local focus of these politics is equally ill-placed in a museum mostly visited by tourists. There is a spot in ‘Making a Heart Like a Tree’ where the combination of red and blue creates a disorienting feeling while reading, but even this isn’t so bad I had to stop reading, nor did it make me stop and reconsider what I’d read. 

I’ve seen this show twice, the first time I saw it I forgot about it around 10 minutes after I saw it, the second time I can’t say it will last either. While Ainsley’s influence, McDiarmid, writes that ‘A man in a red shirt can neither hide nor retreat,’ a painting in a red shirt certainly can.