It's been a bit grey lately on the Isle of Man, so to brighten things up we'll focus on the cheerful shade of Gamboge Yellow in this instalment of 'The Colours of Nature'. Gamboge is a yellow pigment obtained by extracting a gum resin from southeast Asian trees. It's no longer used, due to being poisonous and prone to fading, but the colour was given references in the Werner's Nomenclature of Colours and subsequently in the Thames and Hudson book, Nature's Palette. The references given are the goldfinch, yellow jasmine and sulphur, so join me as I find out a little more about each one.
The pigment gamboge has a long history in art as it was used in 8th century Japanese and Chinese paintings and has also been found on early Indian miniatures. European artists used it since the time it was first imported in the 1600's, and it can be found in the work of J.M.W Turner, Sir Joshua Reynolds and William Hooker. The latter, was the Royal Horticultural Society's botanical artist who mixed the pigment with Prussian Blue to make Hooker's Green, a colour now widely available from many paint brands but premixed with more lightfast pigments. Rembrandt was said to use gamboge as a glaze to produce the golden hue in his paintings, as seen in the portrait below:
Animal Reference: Goldfinch
The goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis) is called 'Lossey ny Keylley' in Manx, which means 'flame of the forest'. I don't remember seeing one of these birds on the Isle of Man, despite them being common here, until a few days ago when one landed on the ground just outside the door to my studio at Grenaby. I was extremely excited to see one as I'd already started the sketch at the top of this blog post and had thought how beautiful the red and yellow colours were. They were no less impressive in real life and I look forward to seeing more of these birds in future. Grenaby is alive with so much birdlife at the moment, it's a real pleasure just to sit outside and listen to their chatter. In fact, just yesterday we were treated to the sound of a great spotted woodpecker!
The yellow on the sketch of a goldfinch is coloured with a Luminance pencil in Bismuth Yellow as this is the corresponding colour given in Nature's Palette. The Winsor and Newton reference is Winsor Yellow.
Vegetable Reference: Yellow Jasmine
Yellow Jasmine (Gelsemium sempervirens) isn't actually a true jasmine, but part of the Gelsemiaceae family. It's also known as Yellow Jessamine or Carolina Jessamine and is the state flower of South Carolina. It has been thought to have medicinal properties in the past but is known to be poisonous to humans due to the alkaloids it contains. The reference photo in Nature's Palette is shown above and is taken from Robert Bentley and Henry Trimen's Medicinal Plants, London, 1880. Two volumes of this books can be viewed on the Biodiversity Heritage Library website.
Mineral Reference: Sulphur
Sulphur is a very reactive, non-metallic element that is used widely in many industrial processes. As such, it's a valuable commodity and people go to great lengths to mine this rich, yellow mineral. In many parts of the world it's produced as a by-product of the oil industry, but in Indonesia it's mined from active volcanoes. The miners here have very little safety equipment and risk their lives to retrieve the 'devil's gold' as it's known. For the full story of how these miners live see this BBC article.
Sulphur is used in the manufacture of many synthetic pigments and is found as an impurity in sodium aluminium silicate to form ultramarine, with its distinctive blue hue. Colourlex.com has a very interesting Pigments Sorted by Elements feature which shows the pigments containing sulphur atoms.
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