The Quality of Yellow

Without going into yellow’s past as the imperial color of the Kahns or the color of the light of Eden, or the color associatedwith Earth as one of the four elements and, without discussing the historical use of yellow as a pigment whose sources vary from ancient Egyptian sulfur, to synthetic 20th century translucent Hansa acrylic yellows, to 19th century lead chromate or chrome yellow a strong favorite of Turner’s to the fugitive(fast fading)  aureolin yellow preferred by Winslow Homer in his watercolors, or to the translucent  organic gamboge from Cambodia also preferred by Turner for it’s glazing ability or, without mentioning the Renaissance painters’ reliance on the toxic  yellow orpiment made from poisonous arsenic because of its promise to imitate a golden effect as described in Cennino Cennini’s Book of Art ( Libro Dell’Arte of 1396), or without talking about the stable and abundant but pale yellow ochre mined from earthen deposits in France and, without discussing too much chemistry or physics and, without  a set of actual paints to demonstrate and, without the expensive powdered gold  mixed with ochre to give a golden highlight as Renaissance artists did and,  without a constant ambient and muted daylight preferred by Da Vinci to insure the constant hue and value of his yellows but,  with only a set of falsifying and inconstant  electronic pixels  as my chromatic evidence I will talk about yellow.

Cadmium yellow was first available to artists in the last quarter of the 1800s.  Impressionists and neo-impressionsts were crazy for it because it gave a  strong yellow hue effect.  This yellow was opaque and potent.  If you applied the paint thickly, purely and opaquely like the Impressionists then, cadmium yellow was made for you.  There were concerns and competition.  The other new 19th century yellow was chrome yellow. It was brilliant when thinly applied to white ground but, it was fugitive ( tending to fade).  Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo expressing concern about the permanence of the new vivid colors, cadmium yellow among them but, he concluded that maybe some fading would give a beneficial effect and help to soften and harmonize what he feared were overly strong colors.  Chief among the strong new colors was cadmium yellow which tolerated very little mixing or blending without becoming dull and chalky.  Cadmium yellow was an odd color revealing itself as pure because, it only reflected a very narrow slice of the visible spectrum. Cadmium yellow was great at absorbing all the other colors of light except for a pure yellow.  This meant cadmium yellow appeared intense and rich but, if you mixed it with another color then the narrow slice of pure yellow collapsed and the beholder only would find a dull yellowish greenish gray or a yellowish orange at best and , at worst it became a light sucking grayed brown. Yechhhh!   Impressionist painters therefore determined to limit their mixing of cadmium yellow with white and as little else as possible.  More mixing meant less light bounced back to the eye and resulted in a weak color effect.  Mixing opaque colors together is called subtractive mixing because, it subtracts light.  Van Gogh  applied  his paint thickly  and  often undiluted by mixing  to insure the strongest color effect. Artists like Van Gogh might mix the cadmium yellow with white  to give the color a quality of halation as seen in the painting example.

Unlike cadmium yellow, gamboge is a translucent color.  When viewed as a thick glob of paint it appears warm, not bright and, with a tendency to list toward green unlike a glob of cadmium yellow. But, when thinly applied to white ground it appears much more yellow.  That’s how Turner used it.  As light bounces off the white ground and back through the glaze of  gamboge it brightens the sensation of yellow.  The thinner the gamboge yellow the greater the sensation of yellow and,  the thicker the gamboge yellow becomes the less the sensation of yellow for the viewer.  Amateurs keep adding more yellow and wonder why they are getting a duller effect as they keep subtracting light by adding the pigment.  In my second example I offer a gamboge based yellow  in varying degrees of thickness,  providing varying degrees of yellow, applied to a white enamel anodized aluminum surface.

In my third example which uses gamboge on an oil primed linen, the thinner I make the glaze of yellow the brighter the yellow of the leaves appear to be.   Hermann Von Helmholtz advised artists to generate the strongest sensation  of spectral opposites in paint they should contrast yellow and blue paint.  In my diagrammed example I have circled areas where I have engineered the blue to be set against the yellow of the leaves.  This helps propel the yellow of the leaves toward the viewer.