Burst into yellow

By Gordana Lakic, Jul 3, 2020

Yellow was always my secret favorite color. I didn’t want to reveal it, I just wanted it to be mine, exclusively. I remember painting my room in my teenage years and happiness that I felt adjusting to the brightness of it. 

Yellow like bright mornings before school, like my little parrot Gara, like NY cabs, a submarine, and a pencil that I always squeeze to hard, my old rain boots, like the house across the candy store with crooked mailbox, yellow vespa that dad never got for me but I rent it at my first trip to Italy, oat fields near the road on our way to summer house, Tara’s rubber duckie, postcards to remind kids to return books, and a smiley face at the end of the sentence just to let you know I was not upset.

The secret lives of color, a book that recently got me thinking, grasping, and dreaming of colors. As I read the stories about the history and origins of colors I realized how wide their spectrum really is. The candle on my table was radiating chrome yellow while I got immersed in a story about Vincent Van Gogh’s letter to his brother Theo, from the time when “he began working on a series of sunflowers paintings, with which he planned to cover his whole studio. He told Theo he was painting them ‘with the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse’ and he hoped they would be symphony of ‘harsh and broken yellows’ and blues ‘from the palest Veronese to royal blue, framed with thin lathes painted in orange lead.’”

We know that artists from his time relied on color to create drama and Van Gogh was certainly no exception. In order to achieve that, besides the perfectly saturated reds and blues, they were missing the right yellow to create the desired balance. “Chrome yellow arrived not too soon and Van Gogh was one of many to fall hard for it.”