The Language Of Yellow

There are many types of languages. These structured communications can be visual, written or spoken.  Language conveys meaning, and in some cases, feeling.  Colour is one element artists and poets have readily on hand. Amazingly, there are millions of colours that the human eye can detect including variations of yellow. Yellow is one of three primary colours sitting somewhere between orange and green.

Colour Wheel

The Theory and Practice of Color - Bonnie E. Snow, Hugo B. Froehlich

(Laidlaw Brothers, 1920)

The word yellow is derived from the Old English geolu meaning … yellow. However, my idea of yellow may not be exactly your idea of yellow. To clarify, we need further description and thus, there is sunny, lemon, mustard, dandelion, corn, flaxen, marigold – the list goes on.  Different kinds of yellow conjure up different types of imagery.

Throughout the ages, this bright and often bold colour varying in hue and intensity has grabbed attention, indicated danger and soothed the soul. It has warmed our hearts and homes. It has given atmosphere to paintings along with making serious fashion statements. Sir Herbert James Gunn’s Pauline in the Yellow Dress is a good example.

Here the artist has used the yellow dress to give focus to the subject and also to show that the sitter, his wife, is a self-assured woman. It takes confidence to wear such a dress, she is meant to be seen. No wallflower is she.

Pauline in the Yellow Dress
Herbert James Gunn, 1944, oil on canvas
Harris Museum, Art Gallery & Library Collection

Van Gogh also had an affinity for the colour yellow. He even lived for a time in a yellow house. He created five artworks focusing on sunflowers. These works hang on walls but hardly sink into a background. According to the Van Gogh Museum website, all of these canvases were painted in only three shades of yellow in order to demonstrate ‘that it was possible to create an image with numerous variations of a single colour without any loss of eloquence.’

Sunflowers
Vincent Van Gogh, 1889, oil on canvas
Van Gogh Museum Collection

The Yellow House
Vincent Van Gogh, 1888, oil on canvas
Van Gogh Museum Collection

For those who paint with words as poets do, yellow also provides eye-catching imagery that in one’s mind can be sweetly tasted, make mouths pucker or feel warmth of light  i.e. ‘banana’, ‘lemon’ and ‘sun’. Here is a delightful mixture of poetry with references to yellow and other colours.

XXXI

Nature rarer uses yellow
    Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets,--
    Prodigal of blue,

Spending scarlet like a woman,
    Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
    Like a lover's words.

Emily Dickinson


Symphony in Yellow

An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.

Big barges full of yellow hay
Are moored against the shadowy wharf,
And, like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.

The yellow leaves begin to fade
And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale green Thames
Lies like a rod of rippled jade.

Oscar Wilde


Pelican Chorus (An Excerpt)
King and Queen of the Pelicans we;
No other Birds so grand we see!
None but we have feet like fins!
With lovely leathery throats and chins!

Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee!
We think no Birds so happy as we!
Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill!
We think so then, and we thought so still!

We live on the Nile. The Nile we love.
By night we sleep on the cliffs above;
By day we fish, and at eve we stand
On long bare islands of yellow sand.

And when the sun sinks slowly down
And the great rock walls grow dark and brown,
Where the purple river rolls fast and dim
And the Ivory Ibis starlike skim

Edward Lear

And here’s a bit of my own drawing and writing this week…

Yellow
Kate Eggleston-Wirtz, 2021
Pen and Ohuhu marker on Paper

Colour Wheel
Cheery is the colour yellow
Warm and glowing - pleasant fellow
Brush with death the colour blue
A sad and melancholy hue

The colour yellow is the one
So full of life - so full of fun
Playful, happy then we have
The colour blue whose face is grave

Now blue upon the other hand
Could be the sea upon the sand
Where blue and yellow like to meet
In calm or stormy tidal beat

Dance together - intermingle
Back and forth amongst the shingle

Till sun says to rest into the night
Artist waking, turns on the light

Meet again on painter’s palette
Mixed emotions brushed beget
Envy – hope - blooming buds in spring
The sky, the earth and everything

Kate Eggleston-Wirtz


Thank you for taking the time to read, Kate 🌞 

https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/pauline-in-the-yellow-dress-152128 accessed 16 January 2021

 https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0031V1962  accessed 13 Jan 2021