Vincent van Gogh: The Yellow House (1888)
Oil on canvas (72 cm x 91.5 cm)
Apparently, yellow is not a popular colour amongst 21st-century Europeans and Americans who, when surveyed, placed it way behind blue, red, and green. In fact, more people named it as their least favourite colour than their best-loved.
That surprises me, as I've always liked the colour yellow and all the things that are coloured yellow; from
stars to sunflowers, ducklings to daffodils.
Painters too have always had a thing for yellow and it was one of the primary colours used in prehistoric cave art; the yellow horse of Lascaux was painted 17,000 years before Franz Marc gave us his famous blue horses.
If the English Romantic painter Turner was one of the first 19th-century artists to use yellow to suggest moods and emotions, it's the great Dutch post-Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh who is probably the painter most associated with the colour.
During his period in the South of France (1888-1899), Van Gogh celebrated yellow in all its shades, from pale lemon to bright sulpher yellow. He even famously lived in house painted yellow and - it is believed by some - once attempted suicide by consuming yellow paint.
I don't know if that's true; and nor do I know if Van Gogh suffered from a rare medical condition - xanthopsia - which can alter perceptions of colour and give the world a yellowish glow. I doubt it. And I prefer anyway to think that Van Gogh, who was well-versed in colour theory, simply loved yellow for its emotional intensity (its joy and vitality).
Perhaps, in the end, too much yellow - like too much sunlight and too much reason - can become overwhelming and end in madness. But a world without yellow would be immensely poorer and duller.
And so that's why I'm going to paint my kitchen yellow ...
A Lick of Yellow Paint
(SA/2024)
Should it really be that surprising when some (or even many) people don't share one's aesthetic preferences?
ReplyDeletePersonally, I'm no fan of yellow to say the least, though I get more interested when it shifts along the colour spectrum to green (the darker the better). If I wanted to paint the sun, I'd follow Ted Hughes' thanatophile bird in his classic collection 'Crow' and do it black, in accordance with the sun's alchemical other: the sol niger.
Clearly, there are many reasons to revile yellow, from its faintly sickening association with Enlightenment reason and 'brightness' of mind, The Beatles' deeply stupid 'Yellow Submarine', and Serge Gainsbourg's tawdry and tedious 'Lemon Incest'. However, as an individual historically acculturated to the role of the scapegoat, I'm interested in yellow's association with murderous exclusion (cf. the Nazis' use of the Yellow Star to mark out Jews in 1930s/40s Germany).
As John Krakauer put it, 'the way to Everest is not the Yellow Brick Road'.
Thanks for this. As I pointed out, yellow is a minority colour, though not unloved by artists.
DeleteHappy should you wish to paint the sun black, but not sure this would work for a small kitchen (and besides, even the dark sun wears a yellow jacket).
Perfectly happy also that you choose to revile the Enlightenment, though I think you might be better advised to adopt a philosophically more ambivalent attitude toward it (such as the one we find in Nietzsche).
Less pleased to see you take a pop at Serge Gainsbourg for the most tenuous of reasons; his song 'Lemon Incest' - recorded with his 12-year-old daughter Charlotte in 1984 and set to the melody of Frédéric Chopin's Étude Op. 10, No. 3. - has nothing to do with the colour located between green and orange on the spectrum of visible light.
However, since you brought Gainsbourg into this - and mentioned the yellow star - perhaps you'll find this track from 'Rock Around the Bunker' more to your liking ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o-Cml3x6gE