Yellow

"What a horrible thing yellow is" -Edgar Degas

Yellow is a color I have been intrigued with lately.  I'm not sure why. It is my basic color, the aura color I feel around me the most, so I'm not usually that into yellow. It's boring. It is too common and present to be of interest. 

I feel much more attraction the complement of yellow, shades of blue.  

But golden is a color I am a attracted to. 

And yellow is a Buddha color. Flowers do yellow very well. Yellow is the happy color.

Yellow is a good food color.

 Yellow is the last hot color as you go up the rainbow, as green can be cool or warm. People think of yellow as a cheerful mentally stimulating color. Yellow can stand for light.

It is the main color of light in our local daystar. So I tend to look past it, as if yellow was just cosmic wallpaper. Suffused with chartreuse, it's the anemic color of leaves just forming in spring, or the fading spent leaves of autumn. 

My favorite way to do yellow is car colors. 

I like seeing a really glossy new yellow car out on a grey and foggy day. But the exact frequency of the yellow I like must be there. If it is too close to chartreuse, it loses its identity. 

But if it goes into curb paint yellow-orange territory, it is too garish for me. 

Yellow is problematic to me as an artist, especially as a rainbowmaker. Even at full strength, yellow reflects far more light than all of the other colors. 

 

So balancing adjustments have to be made so yellow doesn't steal the show. In the rainbow, as seen in the sky, or made by crystal prism, yellow is a fairly narrow band. It is far outweighed by red to the left and green to the right. But to our mind's eyes, yellow is outstanding. 

“The colours red, blue and green are real.

 The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.” 

― Tom Stoppard

(Meandering on with Yellow:)