Kitchen Art | Big Red Two Bottles | Betsy Crum

Big Red, Two Bottles — Red Wall Art by Betsy Crum

Betsy painted the same bottle twice and only committed to one of them. The left-hand Big Red is the real thing, stoplight red straight through. Its partner is drawn in the same lines but drained nearly to white, like the second pull off a screen that's run out of ink. The mint green behind them is worn and slightly dirty, the way a cooler door looks after eleven summers.

The two-bottle setup is the oldest trick in pop art and still the best one: repeat a thing, change one variable, and the object stops being a soda and starts being a subject. Here the variable is saturation, and the effect is that your eye keeps sliding left, then correcting, then sliding left again.

As red wall art it is about as direct as the category gets. Red is the loudest color you can put on a wall, and mint green is one of the few grounds that will hold it without either one backing down — they sit near opposite corners of the color wheel, so the red stays red instead of going pink or going muddy. That's why the print reads as roadside Americana rather than as decor: worn paint, saturated logo, no apology.

Big Red itself was mixed up in Waco in 1937 by Grover C. Thomsen and R.H. Roark, and for its first couple of decades it went by Sun Tang Red Cream Soda — a name nobody was ever going to shout across a gas station. Somebody sensibly shortened it to what people already called it.

Where It'll Work in Your House

Kitchen, first and obviously — over the coffee maker, beside the refrigerator, on the wall above wherever the good glasses end up. The washed-out mint is calm enough to hang against white cabinets without a fight, and the red is loud enough to run a breakfast nook by itself. It's steady kitchen wall art and it earns a place over a bar cart, where a red bottle has never needed an excuse.

It also plays well with family. The single bottle on butter yellow is its natural running mate, the Warhol-style grid is what happens when you stop counting, and the BIG RED DIST. rooftop under a Waco sky is the one that tells you where all of it came from.

Betsy Crum. She painted this pair the way she paints signs and skies — flat, exact, and quietly amused. Original artwork, printed to order, and the rest of it lives in the Betsy Crum collection.

Waco has produced two internationally famous soft drinks and this is the one the rest of the country still hasn't caught on to, which suits Waco fine. The town's other landmarks are in Waco art prints, and every other bottle, can, and cooler shelf we've painted is lined up in Drink Up, Texas.

Made with love. Signed by hand. Shipped with care. Hung with joy.