YELLOW
Good Vibes Rockaway
Summer Saturday's are beach days. My wife and I get up early, walk through the tree-lined streets of Sunnyside, the translucent canopy creating a grand yellow-dappled hall up to Roosevelt Ave where we wait under the gritty trestles of the No. 7 train for the bus out to New York City’s Everyman’s paradise, Far Rockaway. After a lengthy jaunt on the bus, getting more full of beach revelers with each stop, we arrive at the narrow strip of land by the Atlantic. The day typically consists of paddle-boarding, a medley of beach-type fare for lunch - hot dogs, beer, arepas - and finding our own little piece of paradise on the crowded beach, to soak in the warmth and smell the salt in the air while doing not much of anything.
And suffused with yellow.
On some trip I purchased this hat along the boardwalk, and it became a personal emblem, and something of a lucky talisman. It keeps all the bad juju at bay.
The nugget of the idea to use the color yellow as a framework for a number of paintings began with that canopy of trees. The London Plantrees are often streaked with yellows so I began to imitate the shades.
And then later I thought of it as its own paradigm. We take the construct of basing understanding of the relationship of colors to one another on the refracted spectrum as something evident. After all, the rainbow is ubiquitous, produced by a drop of water on the kitchen counter or the film on an oily puddle. It’s obvious that the seven colors we’ve chopped out of the rainbow - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet - are Color. That is what color is. With these paintings what I’m considering is that one is more relevant than the others. That yellow, or some yellows, act as the baseline and what we normally consider the other colors - say red - are also a type of yellow. After all, color is possibly an infinite thing to explore, and as a painter, I get to frame the question (so I can then answer it). So what I might normally name red or brown, I instead call yellow, as I’m only interested in what it is a yellow and how it relates to other yellows.
