I personally don’t like yellow. I find it conjures up unpleasant images of things I don’t really enjoy very much, like earwax and worrying if my teeth look like it.
Of course, it does have its uses, without yellow there would be no orange or green. In light of this, and also thanks to the relentless insistence of someone who shall here remain nameless, I suppose I cannot dismiss yellow so readily, and so, I am now considering the contradiction that is yellow.
In my admittedly bad habit of being a hasty judge, I forgot about some truly brilliant yellow things; of course egg yolk, especially of a 4 minute boiled egg; daffodils – I don’t know why I like daffodils so much, but I think it’s because a bunch only costs a pound and they are very simple, and the thought of spending more than that on something that will wither and die in 5-7 days makes me fell just awful on a number of levels; this chic wallpaper panel that I pasted in at the beginning; and ultimately, Spongebob Squarepants, who over the years and to my own endless amusement, I have become familiar with also as Bob L’Eponge, Bob Esponja and SpongeBob Schwammkopf, depending on my locale.
Not to get too distracted, horrible yellow things and their unpleasant associations are quite numerous, we can include yellow fever, smilies, ageing, rotting, decay, jaundice, cowardice, old toenails, flouro jackets. Yellow also renders other perfectly good colours unpalatable - to combine yellow and black makes danger, as in wasps and small poisonous frogs and police tape. With red, it is just disgusting, as in infected spots and scabs, a promise of much worse to come. And let’s not forget yellow cars or that stupid Coldplay song.
There is an awful lot of theory around colour and personal responses to it that I didn’t know about until I started to write this. Apparently every person responds differently to colours, and it has been proven to all be linked with individual personality. A colour I do like is red. I’m not sure what these things mean, perhaps because I am a philistine, or perhaps because sometimes you just like a thing and dislike another thing and don’t always have to psychoanalyse it.
So, in conclusion, I have found that it is true that yellow is more often than not ghastly, but in certain circumstances has been known to produce fabulous results. I still don’t like it though, and here’s a quote from Edgar Degas, who was a well-respected realist painter in the 1800’s, and so clearly knew a thing or two:
‘What a horrible thing yellow is.’
