Of colours: Yellow

I was 15 and had just moved to Beijing. I was a little country sprig uprooted from the vast expanses of  empty fields and quiet birdsong to be transplanted in a city crawling with as many people that lived in my entire country. I was a tiny sapling out of eden, hungry to see the world, famished for its wonder as the city beat coursed through my veins. It is odd, now, to think back on this age where the smog-heavy skies had never before, to me, felt so high, of this time where the labyrinthic depths of the city seemed to open before me as I ran her roads and avenues, meandered her markets and became lost, incredibly, infinitely lost in all of her beautiful, shrouded mystery.

It is there that I became acquainted with Oscar Wilde, whose Picture of Dorian Gray did nothing less than capture me entirely. Was it for its sheer decadence, the play on death and life and immortality, discovered at a time where one both begins to make sense - rather obnoxiously -  of their own individual grandeur? Of the intuition that immortality goes much beyond the great and the beautiful? That immortality is in fact composed of a series of deaths and rebirth? The fantastical tales and tribulations of the anti-hero? Or was it rather a fascination with the English irony? I believe it was the latter - in French, our writing is heavy, laden with  imagery, metaphors and similes. We fill silence with prose - that is how we  are - hapless romantics.  In English, it is my belief that one can tell of the entire world, the good and the ugly, the bad and the beautiful with but a few short words. I was bewitched and held Beijing in the very palm of my hand (oh, the teenage arrogance). 

But I digress. The order of the day, today, is yellow. In the nineteenth century, French sensationalist literature would be pressed between yellow covers and soon enough, the young and fashionable would be seen, yellow book in hand, strutting about with great pride and defiance. In 1895, Oscar Wilde would be arrested in the streets of London and charged with gross indecency. He had been carrying one such a sunshine-coloured book at the time of the arrest.  

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The present, firmly established in its customs and traditions seldom likes to be shaken out of its comfortable slumber. Habit of thought, but also of being, seldom likes to be launched into vast expanses of unknowingness, to be confronted with that which is different than itself and in the Middle Ages, marginalised groups of people were made to wear yellow clothing. 

But yellow is also the colour of the sun, that which brings joy to our hearts and warmth to the earth. In India, yellow represents peace and knowledge and in China, yellow was the colour only the emperor was allowed to wear. 

And so, the foreign, the strange, the different,  they are the sparks which illuminate the night to help us find new ground, they are the fire which keeps us moving forward, the force, huge, bright, powerful, which leads us onwards into a new century. Let us embrace this spark, this fire, let us be alive with it. 

van Gogh's Sunflower series were painted in joyful expectation at the Gauguin's visit in Arles. Chrome Yellow, was, at the time a revolutionary pigment which allowed artists to bring yellow into their work with much more confidence (earlier yellow pigments were known to be highly unreliable). However, Chrome yellow, as would have done van Gogh's sunflowers, browns and wilts with age.

How to decorate with yellow?