Yellow

OCTOBER 24, 1907 (Part 3)

Although one of his idiosyncrasies is to use pure chrome yellow and burning lacquer red in his lemons and apples, he knows how to contain their loudness within the picture: cast into a listening blue, as if into an ear, it receives a silent response from within, so that no one outside needs to think himself addressed or accosted.

Paul Cezanne. Fruit and jug on a table. C. 1894.

His still lifes are so wonderfully occupied with themselves.

The frequently used white cloth, for one, which has a peculiar way of soaking up the predominant local color, and the things placed upon it now adding their statements and comments, each with its whole heart.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with curtain and flowered pitcher. 1895.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: Intercourse of colors

On October 21, Rilke wrote about painting as “something that takes place among colors”, their mutual intercourse being the whole of painting.

Here, this insight unfolds itself through the metaphor of painting as conversation among colors, complete with listening, responding, statements and comments.

Colors talk among themselves, and all the spectator has to do is witness this conversation.

SEEING practice: Cezanne

There are two “listening” colors here, the humble, unobtrusive blue of the first still life, and the white cloth of the second. Do you see how different their listening is?

Rilke continues to describe van Gogh paintings he saw in Bernheim gallery.

OCTOBER 17 (Part 4)

<…> A man’s portrait against a background (yellow and greenish yellow) that looks as if woven of fresh reed (but which, when you step back, is simplified to a uniform brightness):

Vincent van Gogh. Portrait of Trabuc, an attendant at Saint Paul hospital. 1889

An elderly man with a short-cropped, black-and-white mustache, sparse hair of the same color, cheeks indented beneath a broad skull:

the whole thing in black-and-white, rose, wet dark blue, and an opaque bluish white——except for the large brown eyes—

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

COLORS AND WORDS

“As if woven of fresh reed”: could one even imagine a more precise way to describe not only this particular painting, but ALL of van Gogh’s mature work?

Vincent van Gogh. Wheat field with a Reaper. 1890. Click the image to zoom in.

SEEING PRACTICE: VAN GOGH

I remember the exact moment when I realized that what van Gogh shows us is a precise and truthful depiction of HIS visual reality, his unique experience of fluid, dynamic color. It was in Amsterdam, in front of this self-portrait.

Vincent van Gogh. Self-portrait with grey felt hat. 1887. Click the image to zoom in.

Click the image to zoom in (on Van Gogh Museum site) and see this intensified reality, as though woven of fresh reed which borrowed its colors from the rainbow?