As in India, we
were told, they have the Pink Days, we’re now having our Yellow Days—the five
acacias along the driveway in full bloom, and their upstart offspring, mere
slips slipping along the fence between our yard and the professor’s next door;
and then (that long-ago then) the wash of yellow mustard weed washing the
hillsides of their winter glum, transfiguring the rows of ascetic black crosses
of the dormant vineyards. The
mustard weed washed my despair away back then, when I fled my winter
confinement for the promises of life and wakening across the valley in the blue-tiled
town named for wildcats.
I don’t think I own
one single yellow shirt or skirt or sweater, not even socks. And yet yellow has meant hope and
freedom and promise to me, since that discovery of the mustard weed that
distant January. And it is
radiance, pure and simple, in the paintings of Bonnard.
I love that
“Bonnarding” has become a verb tense, meaning wandering around and adding
yellow to paintings.
"Sometimes, having mixed
one of his burning hues . . . and applied it to the work in progress, he would
wander around the house from canvas to canvas, finding little places where he
could insert what he had left over.’
Bonnard was also known to retouch his work even after it had left his
possession: ‘I always carry in my
pocket a little box with some colours ready in it. When I come across one of my canvases that displeases me,
out comes my little box, and I fix it.’
In the most famous yarn of all, the artist once persuaded Vuillard to
distract a guard at the Musée Luxembourg, while he surreptitiously reworked a
painting that had been hanging there for several years."
image: Pierre Bonnard, Bouquet de mimosas
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