Working with blood can be more complicated in certain ways than working
in other medium. For instance having
to work gloved up, having to have a
barrier on every surface, treating everything, even though I’m working
with my own blood, and I don’t have
any communicable diseases, but the
point I’m making is that it’s biological
matter and I keep everything entirely sanitary. There’s that, the need to
work through barriers, and having to
refrigerate it, sanitation afterward in
terms of having to to wipe everything
down , but on the flip side, you would
be doing other things if it came down
to it, like with oils, you would have to
Gesso surfaces, and really get the oil
out of the brushes, the nuisance of all
that stuff, and mixing colors, so I find
it’s the absolute perfect medium for
me. I see things mono-chromatically,
I’m not color blind but I don’t identify with color, I’m not intuitive when it
comes to complimentary colors, and
color theory, the fact of the matter is
that I just don’t identify with bright colors. I think that’s great for whoever is
inspired to paint that way, or tattoo that way, but I just see more mono-chromatically, and
I’m more comfortable working that way, so that’s also another aspect to it. But I don’t
think that blood is more difficult to work with than any other medium in general. It’s like
uniform, there’s a uniformity to it that you don’t get with color. As soon as you throw a
color in the mix, it’s like, does that work?
Saint: I paint too, and I remember someone told me, if it doesn’t work in black and
white, it won’t work in color. A lot of artists sometimes turn stuff monochromatic
to see where certain key points of lighting are.
Right, and that’s an interesting point because color has value too, value in terms of how
dark something is, the artistic application of the word value, so working with colors that
maybe look different but have similar value, it’s weird, it boggles my mind, kind of like
math and directions, so I just stick to what I do best.
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I have to shoot a lot in color and at some point my brain starts to tell me “this