Not so mellow yellow

For her latest column, Suffolk-based artist, educator and presenter Grace Adam looks at how yellow is not always so mellow when it comes to art

Yellow: yes, to sunshine, lemons and buttercups, but also yes to illness, cowardice and treachery. Judas often dons a yellow cloak in medieval paintings. Think early branding. From fast food to flat pack, from hire cars to deliveries, yellow is a colour loved by logo designers. It’s eye- catching, easy to contrast (and apparently can act as an appetite stimulant). In the animal kingdom, black plus yellow often signals don’t touch, and certainly don’t eat! Remember Breaking Bad? All the baddies wore yellow. Yellow has a dangerous past – pigments used for thousands of years were made from toxic ingredients: arsenic, lead, cadmium.

Gauguin, during his disastrous stay with Van Gogh at the Yellow House in Arles, wrote about his companion’s obsession with yellow:

‘Oh yes! He loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from Holland. Those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul that abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth.’

Here the painter uses warm gentle yellow to describe the striding figure. The low sun sits in the centre of the corn-filled horizon. Purples slip into blues and yellows slip into browns. You can feel the heat of the day.

In this version, the gnarly tree leans across the picture plane against a strange lime coloured sky. An almost silhouetted sower goes about his business, with the halo of the sun behind him. The painter admired Gustav Millet’s painting of a sower and he adored Japanese prints. Van Gogh brought glorious emotional colour to the serious subject of landscape painting, but those vibrant yellows are starting to fade. His sunflowers are aging, and his fields turning to autumn, as some of the pigments he used were so light sensitive.

Polka dot pumpkins or kabocha, very often yellow and black ones are a feature of contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s work. Her first pumpkin appeared in 1946. This one sits overlooking the sea on the island of Naoshima. Its predecessor was washed away in a storm. This replacement has a hook on it, so it can be whisked to safety in case of typhoons. Kusama’s family cultivated the plant’s seeds, and their family home was surrounded by acres of pumpkins. It is fair to say that the 96-year-old artist has had a life-long obsession, enjoying their humorous shapes and variety of colours. They remind her of her childhood. Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, crossing the road every day to work in her studio. ‘I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art,’ Kusama wrote in her autobiography Infinity Net. All those dots, thousands of them drawn, painted and sculpted over decades. Repetition of the dots, she says, helps to “obliterate” her anxieties.

I guess the moral of this story is…feast your eyes on a Van Gogh, (or a Kusama) any time you can.

Visit Grace Adam Artist and The Art Channel

Featured images supplied by Grace Adam