Yellow is everywhere today in all possible chroma, from a pale emerging creamy yellow tulip to a hedge spray of golden forsythia. We have a loud and gaudy almost-hurts-the-eyes yellow-green chartreuse on our usually ordinary quiet trees. And over here, we have swaths of daffodils in the hue of sunshine, a symbolic shade of yellow. A giant tube of cadmium yellow has been squeezed out and is spilling over the landscape. An immense artistic hand spread out gorgeous blooming brushstrokes and walked off with the empty tube.
I spent a day this week walking all over the Morton Arboretum. Miles and meadows of daffodils, everywhere you look, from one horizon to the next. So much yellow-ness it became abstract to me. I stopped seeing individual bobbing yellow blossoms. I could only see the large wedges of yellow, next to wedges of yellow green, relieved by a pond of blue reflecting the sky. If Mark Rothko were happy in the springtime, he would paint this.
In sheer yellow brilliance, the dandelions are in competition with the daffodils. This week regiments of dandelions have appeared in full attack, armored with oportunistic blossoms.
I have a close relative who has an aversion to the color yellow. And this is not just because he must deal with the dandelions invading our yard. He says his hatred of yellow goes way back to a sickening episode of eating too many yellow marshmallow candy chicks one spring in his childhood. He has not been able to bear much yellow since then. Therefore we will never paint our kitchen yellow, and I have no yellow in my closet any more.
In spite of all this, my close relative admits that he enjoys yellow flowers and even the yellow-greens in nature. Nature can be forgiven any garish combinations because it presents an overall design scheme that stuns the senses into delight.
