Saturday 26 April 2008

Sunshine, yellow




It's warm, straight from shivery cold to very warm. Coats are off and a man on the bus is wearing a yellow sweatshirt. Extremely yellow. Yellow like the bus handrail, like a yellow highlighter pen layered on so thickly that the text beneath disappears. Fine on a canary, not on a person. All the way here it bothers me. Off the bus and walking away, ahead of me, through the crowds, bursts of glaring yellow are still visible into the distance. Tired, busy, crowded, yellow. Much too yellow.

13 comments:

Dale said...

:-> Way too much yellow. I love you, Jean!

cbb said...

I can completely sympathize with your antipathy. For the longest time I couldn't bear orange. Found it insufferable. And then all of a sudden it was as if I awoke to it. Colors purportedly have correlations with our (purported) chakras, orange relating to the sacral and the need to balance male-female energies intrapsychically. As it happens, that did appear to be one of my midlife tasks. Anyhow, that was as close to an explanation as I could get for my otherwise mysterious reversal of affinity.

(Still, sometimes, of course, quite like a cigar, a color is just... a color. Your post made me smile!)

Lucy said...

The buttercup yellow on the flower is lovely though.

Yellows and oranges are difficult, often lovely in nature, but not artificial ones. Oilseed rape fields bother me in the same way.

I learned eventually I couldn't wear any yellow, it just looks sickly on me, but some people can...

Brenda Clews said...

But I loved your Vienna trip! Sorry I don't get by often enough, though when I get to my blogroll yours is always the first place I go.

What a great meditation on the extremity of yellow. That brash, harsh highlighter yellow. Oh, what it does to writing! Or body writing. Ought to be outlawed.

My daughter ordered an Andy Warhol t-shirt with a yellow banana on it and it was outrageous, I'll agree. But it was art, and only a slash of yellow. The neck on the t-shirt was, however, too high, the kind that make you feel strangled, and so she never wore it. Only once in awhile we'd take it out and look at it. Yellow (that sort of yellow) does that to you.

xo

xo

Brenda Clews said...

Never mind, keyboard's sticky! It's the yellow!

Anonymous said...

I hav a short like that - something I picked up for a dollar or two at a thrift store. Wore it exactly once.

Thora said...

How colours jarr sometimes for different reasons.Your descriptions
were great.Today a friend wrote that she was fed up like a baby full of mash and veg.You were fed up with yellow.Words are magic.

Anonymous said...

Jean -- this writing is stunning.

You know, it's almost Barthesian. Distilled. Scalpelled. Brilliant, a glimpse into the beyond from the mundane.

Thank you.

Zhoen said...

Going to be a colorful week.

I've never been a big fan of yellow, with the exception of the occasional saffron or lemon.

Sky said...

lol @ too much yellow! i think of yellow as warmth. when i see it i feel warm and cheerful and am reminded of the sun's glow. maybe that is because here in the pacific northwest we are so sun deprived from november until april that we will take it anyway we can get it! :)

Rosie said...

not so mellow yellow?

Lucy said...

That single slab of yellow of the book on the coffee table in all the blue-greens in the Hockney portrait of Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, that's a stroke of genius...

Jean said...

I've nothing against yellow. I love strong colours. It was just this particular shade!