Friday, April 24, 2020

This message brought to you by our sponsor...the color Yellow

The final week of April is here and is apparently being sponsored by Yellow.
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 around my local forest preserves in West Chicago.  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 opportunistic blossoms.