Decoding Yellow
Our contributing writer Miriam Panieri looks at Van Gogh’s evocative paintings
The colour yellow associates with light, energy and vitality. Yellow regenerates and stimulates humans, transmitting clarity, certainty and life. In visual arts one can quickly link it to Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Klimt’s motives and to Mondrian’s squares inside his geometrical creations.
Like a big, bright, pretty eye, yellow remains there, observing other colours in artworks, balancing the composition when present.
Are there so many artworks where yellow is the undisputed protagonist?
In Mondrian’s compositions yellow was always the smallest square since it is the brightest colour of the spectrum and that way it balances the other colours.
On the contrary, Mark Rothko’s first non-figurative painting “No. 11 / No. 20” (1949) reimagines a predominance of yellow and green in two flat shapes, marking the beginning of the artist’s research for purity as an abstract expressionist.
However, traveling a bit earlier in art history time line, there is an artist who is impossible not to link to yellow’s expressive power: expressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh.
Van Gogh’s passion for sunflowers is not a mystery and he seems to have painted countless canvases with those prominent flowers in them. Yellow elements are there in his Starry Night (1889), where blue is clearly predominant, and yet, the yellow star lights become the principal characters on their own, and shine so deeply around the smaller brushstrokes.
The iconic motion of Van Gogh’s evocative paintings is the first aspect we remember of him, along with a vivid colour palette, typical of Expressionism.
Yet, according to Vincent Van Gogh’s Museum in Amsterdam: “His palette wasn’t always so vivid. If we compare Vincent’s first still lives with his later masterpieces, we see a long quest, in which his colours changed from dark to bright.”
In the beginning, Van Gogh worked mainly in grey and blue tones like most of Dutch artists did at that time. One can remember his early work “The potato eaters” (1885), so dark yet intense.
Unsatisfied, Van Gogh studied the colour theory by himself. What lit him up inside, was discovering complementary colours : red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange, and the fact that they intensify one another. Yellow came back as protagonist here, with his piece Irises (1890) as a masterly example of this research, applying the yellow and purple duo.
Literally transformed by this discovery and by Paris Modern art scene his studies on colour combinations progressed until becoming a stylistic choice.
The piece where yellow is at its greatest abundance is “Wheat field with a reaper and sun” (1889). Here Van Gogh best shows how one’s inner world can have a resonance on the outside, with the wheat symbolising the eternal cycle of nature and the reaper standing for death. The artist celebrated the colours and the shapes, giving a chance to the audience to perceive them in the unique way.
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