Hellfire Club did not begin this way. The original version was full of colour — purples, blues, a face still trying to be multiple things at once. Then came the clay: the covering, the decision to begin again from beneath. What emerged was almost entirely red.
The simplicity is deceptive. This is a painting that appears to be one colour and contains everything. The red is not flat — it moves in depth, in darkness, in streaks that fall from the eyes like lava cooling as it descends. There is no single red here, only the illusion of it: each layer slightly different, slightly closer to or further from the heat at its source.
The eyes are where the fire lives. Orange spiralling into amber, into a blue pupil at the centre — still blue, still capable of looking upward. The blue is an image: it means the face has not lost the sky. Whatever it has been through — and you cannot name it, but you know it the moment you look — it still holds the capacity to see above itself. And above the brow, gold presses down. In my visual language, gold at the top means redemption has not been cancelled. It simply has not arrived yet.
The face is ferocious and says nothing. Yet anyone who stands before it understands immediately, without explanation: oh. Life. The hard kind. This is the painting's specific power — it does not describe suffering, it does not narrate it. It presents a face that has absorbed the full complexity of being alive, and trusts the viewer to recognise what that looks like. Because life is not one thing. There are many contradictory, overlapping, unresolvable things pressed together until they read as a single colour from a distance.
The red wraps. It envelops. It is not the colour of rage alone but of everything that has been burned through and survived — lava does not destroy without also leaving new ground behind it.
The gold is still up there; You just can't see it above your eyes. The blue is still in the eye, but not much. The light has not gone out; they're just not in reach of the face. And thus, we're all in a hellfire club. And that is life, we struggle and taunt as if all is just a game club.
