Most of the time, I don't choose the colors in a painting, the colors choose me. But in accepting that choice, there is an underlying reason, sometimes visual and other times sensual, why a particular color works with a painting's composition and content.
In this particular painting, I probably chose yellow because I wanted to surround the figure with a halo of "enlightenment," the point, ironically, of this line from Ecclesiastes. "Seeing the light," is a common proverb for the process of understanding. But yellow has, I have learned, many other connotations.
While reading the book "Ulysses Annotated," by Don Gifford, I came upon this entry for "yellow" (page 13): "In referring to the feast day of St. John Francis Regis…"But the gold of liturgical vestments is not a yellow fabric but a cloth of gold…Liturgically, the color yellow has many negative connotations: 'Yellow is sometimes used to suggest infernal light, degradation, jealousy, treason, and deceit. Thus, the traitor Judas is frequently painted in a garment of dingy yellow." The entry states that in the Middle Ages, heretics were obliged to wear yellow. A genizah document from 1121 gives the following description of decrees issued in Baghdad: Two yellow badges [are to be displayed], one on the headgear and one on the neck. In 1274, Edward I of England enacted the Statute of Jewry, which also included a requirement: Each Jew, after he is seven years old, shall wear a distinguishing mark on his outer garment, that is to say, in the form of two Tables joined, of yellow felt of the length of six inches and of the breadth of three inches. More recently, one is reminded of the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe.
From this perspective, my painting takes on another meaning: a person who exists surrounded by or generating iniquity. Why an artist or anyone choses one color instead of another is a mystery whose sources lie well below the rational process. It is after the choice is made that the underlying rationales may be discovered. This form of communication, between painting, the viewer and him/herself, is a spirit of life that is sometimes found embedded in a work of art.