Yellow.
From somewhere out of nowhere, a song came to my mind. The song called ‘An Endless Sky of Honey’ from Kate Bush. It is over 40 minutes long masterpiece about outdoor adventures on a single summer day, starting from morning and ending 24 hours later.
A decade ago, it was in my playlist. And now suddenly, again.
Coincidently Kate Bush sings: “This is a song of colour”. And I kept listening.
“Could be honeycomb
In a sea of honey
A sky of honey
Whose shadow, long and low
Is slipping out of wet clothes?
And changes into
The most beautiful
Iridescent blue
Who knows who wrote that song of Summer
That blackbirds sing at dusk
This is a song of colour
Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust
Then climb into bed and turn to dust
Every sleepy light
Must say goodbye
To day before it dies
In a sea of honey
A sky of honey
Keep us close to your heart
So if the skies turn dark
We may live on in
Comets and stars”
She sings about honey. “A sea of honey, a sky of honey”.
Honey. What an open-ended color. Is it yellow, or is it brown?
Defining a color, such as honey, is challenging in any color space. Only a 1% shift in any of the partial colors from one direction to another can drastically change the whole character of the color.
Honey verges on to ochre. Ochre is the oldest yellow pigment, dated back 75 000 years ago. It’s believed to be one of the first pigments used by humans. The yellow color comes from limonite, iron (III) oxide-hydroxide, one of the most common minerals on earth, and it has been used by different civilizations on different continents.
She also sings about crimson, red, and rust.
And the most beautiful iridescent blue.
In the Color Wheel, colors are organized based on their relationship with each other. Each color has a counterpart, a complementary color. As opposites, they create the most substantial contrast. They are the extremes of the axis. Violet is the counter color of yellow. As in her song, what started as light honey on the early morning beach, turns into long shadows and iridescent blue at dusk, getting close to violet.
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Yellow, my friend.
In art history, the yellow color relates to several undisputed classics. Think about van Gogh’s sunflowers, or Warhol’s banana, or Mondrian’s endeavor with primary colors to seek universal beauty. Or Anish Kapoor’s artwork Yellow, a monumental six-square-meter yellow disc in the wall. It looks like a solid painting from a distance, but once you step closer, you realize it’s void. The wall is not flat but concave. And Rothko. His paintings are indeed glowing as “sand sing in crimson, red and rust.” None of these colors wouldn’t exist without yellow.
One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Wassily Kandinsky, suggested that certain colors are related to certain shapes; yellow to triangle, red to square, and blue to circle. However interesting the theory, it was based on empiric experiments and has no scientific grounds.
Another interesting association is music. Some people are able to see sound as color. It’s a relatively rare neurological phenomenon called chromesthesia that around 8% of people have. They constantly and involuntarily become aware of the perception of color in association with sounds.
In western cultures, the experience of color and music has always been closely interwoven. The analogy between sounds and colors was compelling, for example, to the Greeks because both could be organized in regularly stepped scales. Number seven encompasses the concept of the scale in music. Aristotle’s color scale was arranged based on the brightness in correspondence with their perception from white-yellow-red-purple-green-blue-black: similarly in seven steps.
Music and color both follow a spectrum. Isaac Newton formed the fundamentals of how we perceive color. He ran experiments with a prism and discovered the color spectrum for the first time. He learned that objects absorb and reflect different amounts of light. For the first time it was understood that light was responsible for the existence of the color.
Josef Albers continued from there. Instead of scrutinizing single colors, he was interested in the ways colors interact with each other. Albers devoted his life to see color what it truly is — as it physically is. In his book Interaction of Colour he indicates through different pragmatic examples how ambiguous the perception of color is. Just ask 50 persons to think about the color ‘yellow’. It’s likely that all of them have different yellow in mind. Albers is behind the color subtraction and afterimage theories. His lifelong task was to demonstrate that color, if anything, is the most relative medium in art.
In brand-building, yellow constitutes dozens of well-known global brands. Think about yellow M or for example the very specific yellow shade of the Post-it® sticky notes. A brand can be recognized by removing everything else but the color. Therefore color is closely related to persuasion — selling.
— — — —
Yellow there.
Or should we say attention, please!
Yellow is the brightest color of the visible spectrum and the most noticeable of all colors. Therefore, it‘s suitable for communicating danger and alerts.
Designers typically use yellow cautiously. On large surfaces, yellow loses its vibrant character and instead becomes overwhelming and dominant.
Yellow is one of the three primary colors. A color that can’t be created by mixing. Yet again, it’s an essential ingredient of millions of other colors and shades.
It’s the color of multiple faces and extreme contradictions.
Light tones represent youth, like newborn chicken or flower.
At the end of the timeline, a yellow patina appears on the surfaces of the objects: on old newspapers in grandma’s attic or on autumn leaves. It’s the beginning and the end.
It’s like light itself, bright and lively in the morning, faint and saturated in the evening.
It’s like life itself, the energetic C-vitamin that keeps us going, and cynical and depressive in its most darkest forms of human existence. It’s also a color of serious illness.
It’s a color of spring. Re-birth and sad statistics.
…………
About my creative production;
“Honey of the sky, honey of the sea.”
Inspired by the Aerial album cover, I was seeking to explore honey tones. The image on the background is taken by attaching the camera to a microscope. I placed a tiny petal of a flower to the glass slide. In her song, Kate Bush sings about comets and stars, but similarly, the eternity can be found from something very small and when you look very close, “in a grain of sand”. (William Blake)
The person painted with watercolors, walking in the glowing honey, is the one
“Whose shadow, long and low
Is slipping out of wet clothes?
And changes into
The most beautiful
Iridescent blue”
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