Artist's Date #55: Yellow As Teacher

When my daughter was three I put a bunch of primary colored paint on her easel, which stood in the center of our bright living room. We’d moved to that apartment because it was flooded with light. The front of the easel was covered with a big piece of paper and I set brushes out on the ledge. See what it’s like to paint every color. I might have said something like that. Before I could so much as turn around she’d covered the whole of it in yellow water, just one color over the whole surface. I like to paint yellow, she said, to my surprise, because it makes me feel happy and warm like the sun. 

I was astounded because I hadn’t expected her to do anything with this invitation. I didn’t even really think that assignment had been real. Had I ever done this myself? Did I actually think colors had feelings? Does everyone feel colors? Is this a thing? Is this thing actually art? I felt this all again when I stood in front of To Live, a painting by Yameng Lee Thorp at pt.2 gallery, this weekend. I absolutely felt the white light on the meadow. The hopefulness of the exact color of a morning before the sun breaks through into day. A whole yellow canvas feels radical now, as if we ought not be able to imagine such gentleness or simplicity otherwise.

The show did strange and fun things with color, summoning both emotions and abstract landscapes from nature and flowers. As I walked around the gallery I noticed I was drawn in more to the dark ones, how three smaller paintings all in a row courted me more than the opening canvas, as friendly as that welcome was. The moody maroons and dark blues made more sense to me, and their size also made sense, as if each hard emotion needed containment, while also being placed in solidarity with one another.

I was with my art writing group, which is led by Justin Carder of Bathers Library, a community-supported art book library in Oakland and so we got to go behind the scenes. As we walked through the space behind the space we saw the older work of the same artist as well as work by other artists he represented.

I loved one painting by Alicia McCarthy who uses a repeated image / structure in her work that the curator and owner of the gallery called a weave. The weave sometimes looks like people leaning against each other or a vase with many stripes that hold it together. One was on a mustard background and I thought again about yellow, how it can be so very hip when it’s mixed with orange in a particular way. The same yellow stood behind a vase of painted flowers in the back of the main gallery, in Zachary Hart Baker’s painting: It’s not always about roses.

Before I had met up with the group I had parked over on Echo and Rose, a neighborhood filled with gardens, in which I’d never wandered. While I did I had the impulse to see how many flowers I could take photos of and I did — #35 without really trying. The roses (maybe the street was named after them) were enormous enough to fill two hands together and the varieties of just these flowers might have been a whole thing to count on their own. The yellow flowers though, were the ones I almost ignored. The ones that grow in their own seas of grass. The ones that were humble and turned to fluff as the season moves along into summer and then later fall.

At the end of the class we sat around drinking even more coffee and Justin pulled up his pants a little bit by the ankle when he’d crossed his legs and some yellow socks peeked out. We laughed about the color, which matches the cover of the pdf’s of art essay he gives us every week — heady things, funny things, difficult things. The yellow of thought — of a brain on fire but one that also knows enough not to burn out.

That very weekend was the closing weekend of the Van Gogh Museum's exhibit on the color yellow. Through the website, I learned that Olafur Eliasson says: I think yellow has to do with seeing more than we normally think we are seeing. It is almost like having a vision, seeing something that is on the other side of the horizon of what we can see. How I pray for that.