Vincent Van Gogh “Starry Night”
David Dunlop has a unique approach to teach art. That’s probably because his studies about art have a unique approach. David told me that he researches, reads and visits venues with art exhibitions. He analyzes and figures out how artists of the past operated. That’s going back to caves, cultures, and creations throughout history.
Today’s speak is about the warm and cheerful color yellow, from an artist’s point of view (POV), rather than from the interior design POV. So let’s hear what David, the artist, has to say about the color yellow.
David Dunlop summer afternoon workshop Amblers Farm
By the way, every workshop David teaches consists of an hour lecture about art, mostly from the intellectual POV, followed by a small painting in support of his lecture. So much fun! 
Yellow!
A color associated with Earth, as one of the four elements. Known to be the imperial color of the Kahns or the color of the light of Eden. Yellow as a pigment has history that varies in use from ancient Egyptian sulfur to synthetic 20th century translucent Hansa acrylic yellows.
A strong favorite of Turner, in the 19thcentury, was lead chromate or chrome yellow as well as the fugitive (fast fading) aureolin yellow. Turner also favored the translucent organic gamboge, from Cambodia, for its glazing ability. Winslow Homer, like Turner, had a preference for aureolin yellow for his watercolors.
David with his yellows. Could be gamboge or aureolin, both transparent.
yellow-orpiment-menk
The Renaissance painters relied on the toxic yellow orpiment made from poisonous arsenic because of its promise to imitate a golden effect, according to Cennino Cennini’s Book of Art (Libro Dell’Arte of 1396).
Popular with artists is the stable and abundant pale yellow ochre, mined from earthen deposits in France. At times, yellow ochre was mixed by Renaissance artists with expensive powdered gold to give golden highlights.
Cadmium yellow, opaque and potent, was first available to artists in the last quarter of the 1800s. Impressionists and neo-impressionists were crazy for it because it gave a strong yellow hue effect. If you like to apply the paint thick, pure and opaque like the Impressionists, cadmium yellow was made for you. The other new 19th century yellow was chrome yellow. It was brilliant when thinly applied to white ground, but it was fugitive.
Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo expressing concern about the permanence of the new vivid colors, 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 the opaque cadmium yellow. 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. At worst it became a light-sucking grayed brown. Yechhh!
Impressionist painters were determined to limit the 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 thick and often undiluted 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. The thicker the gamboge yellow becomes, the less the sensation of yellow for the viewer.
Yellow light in News Stand-oil on anodized aluminum 24×48
Amateurs keep adding more yellow and wonder why they are getting a duller effect as they keep subtracting light by adding more pigment. In David’s second image, he offer a gamboge based yellow in varying degrees of thickness, providing varying degrees of yellow, applied to a white enamel anodized aluminum surface.
Yellow Flora in a Florida Marsh-oil on linen 36×36
In his third image, he uses gamboge on oil primed linen, the thinner he makes the glaze of yellow the brighter the yellow of the leaves appears to be. Hermann Von Helmholtz advised artists in order to generate the strongest sensation of spectral opposites in paint they should contrast yellow and blue paint.
Diagrammed image
In his diagrammed image, he has circled areas where he has engineered the blue to be set against the yellow of the leaves. This helps propel the yellow of the leaves toward the viewer.
Visit David’s website. There you will find his DVD’s, his lectures and his blog link. He is a busy artist. He gives of his time and talents to support a cross-section of venues. http://www.daviddunlop.com.
Do you like to wear yellow? How has yellow touched your life? Did you know that the color yellow attracts bees? I don’t mean flowers, I mean like a yellow blouse or shirt? Have you ever worn something yellow to a picnic? Ouch!
I enjoyed reading your blog, Gail! Yellow is a great color – interesting to learn and read about its history in painting. Of course, I loved your guest blogger. He is always a fount of information!
Thank you for sharing this information!
Cindi, great to see you visit. Thank you. Your comments posted perfectly. Thank you. I enjoyed having David visit and so did lots of other people, even those that do not know him.
Great post, Gail and David. I’ll never see the color yellow the same way again. Arsenic, really? That is so cool. Like Rhonda said above, if you aren’t an artist, you don’t think about the raw materials that go into creating a color pallet to put onto the canvas. Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Paula, there you are. My goodness, thanks for commenting. I did a painting this week where I had to use that cadmium yellow, very carefully, it is a tricky pigment b/c it will muddy quickly, as David pointed out. It is opaque, but I didn’t have my transparent gamboge with me at the Ambler’s Farm where we were painting.
Gail, This is such fascinating information. Thank you! I will be back to read more posts.
Monica, how wonderful to see you here. Thanks for saying hello. I am praying for you. Can you feel the prayers?
my friend the artist always paints with yellow and purple when she’s depressed or blue and orange. Took me a while to figure out she goes for complimentary (or is it complementary?) colors.
Hey there Kate, it is complementary. Don’t ask . . . I think the English language has some pretty ridiculous grammar (shouldn’t it be grammER?) rules. I grew up in Brooklyn, so i say grammer, not grammar, then shouldn’t it be grama? If you read this, you will have read this. Come-on. Who do we go to with these issues? Where did you grow up Kate. Did you say you write humor, uh oh, same issue.
Anyway, those complements can vibrate at times, Christmas mostly. Thank you for stopping by.
I absolutely loved your blog. How interesting to hear about all the different minerals used over the past centuries–quite impressive and great info to use in novels. Presently, I write Historical Romance in the 1800’s in the US(western), but I’m going to copy this blog and possibly use some of the info for my artist heroine in an upcoming Scottish Medieval–at least that’s one of my many dreams is to eventually write Scottish Medievals. Thanks so much for sharing all this. Great stuff! Keep theinfo coming.
Hi Beverly, great news, to use this info in novels. When you get to it, I will enjoy seeing how you tie this info into the Medieval period. I would have to do some research for that period 11th, 12th centuries. Anything before the Age of Enlightenment, 16th century was dark, stiff and overbearing. But I would have to brush up. I am an historian. I taught History of Architecture and Interior Design at the University level for years. I am writing a Historical Romance in the 19th century, in the Victorian era, 1860’s. I have renamed the era Victoriana. I wrote a couple of blogs in the period. If you would like to investigate: http://www.gailingis.com/wordpress, and see the list. Thank you for stopping by.
Too easy to look at colors on a painting and forget that they’re really minerals from a tube. The Science in Art! =:-D Thank you so much for your explanation.
Rhonda, thanks for the comment. I just mentioned to Suze on her post, I don’t know where my crowd is. Fun to read what you wrote, “The Science in Art!. Love it, thanks again.
What an utterly fascinating blog post! One can see from it how the chemistry of paint actually affected the stylistic development of a painters work! Without the necessity of applying cadmium yellow in thick gobs to acheive the intensity of color the artists required would Impressionism (or the many subsequent styles that followed) ever have developed? I can’t wait to read more!
Hi Victoria, thanks for the comment. It’s good to hear from you. I am so pleased you enjoyed the technicalities of pigment.