Yellow Room

From the “Work in Progress” blog series

I enter the yellow room.

Literally, I am in the south drawing room of Sir John Soane’s house (now museum) in Holborn. In 1833, Soane, a wealthy British architect, secured an Act of Parliament—to preserve, “in perpetuity,” his house as it was at the time of his death. Mostly, it is as it was then. 

I am here because a colleague, an expert in Eighteenth Century domestic spaces, says Soane painted the room its vibrant yellow because “he could,” and the paint would last. It was one of the first yellow paints that “didn’t oxidize and turn black.” For contemporary designer, Tim Gosling, “The spectacle of walking into a room that glows yellow must have been extraordinary.” 

It is. 

It also suggests another yellow room. My bedroom  (circa 1973) on Hubbard Drive. 

Like Soane, I made my room yellow because I could. He got access to more enduring paint, now called now called Soanian yellow. I got coveted space. The yellow on yellow made it feel like it was more than yellow. It was yellow’s yellow, an electric lemon,  brighter than daffodils, sharper than sunshine. 

“By doing the walls, the upholstery and the curtains in one color, without fringed and complicated passementerie, it became very contemporary,” Gosling says of Soane’s room. 

Maybe. But for me, the repeated use of yellow acts as a voice, corralling multiple stories. It speaks and signifies. 

I look a long way back. In my yellow room, I am sixteen.  

The room has two metal closet doors, painted yellow. The book shelves bracketed to a yellow wall are also painted yellow. 

The box springs and full-sized mattress sit on the floor pushed against another yellow wall. I have a window above my head and another near my feet so sunshine can cover me. Wispy, see-through, yellow polka-dot curtains hang across the windows. 

Yellow sheets, pillows cases, and duvet cover the mattress.

The room also has an alcove, painted yellow.  There is a wood desk inside it (I want to remember it as yellow, but did I paint it? Or is my mind trying to color it now?).

The floor lamp flagging the desk is absolutely yellow.

The room is upstairs and around the corner. It’s an oasis or perhaps an island, separate from the rest of the house. The room was designated as my mother’s sewing room, though she always did the mending downstairs in the gold chair in the TV room or on the white couch in the living room. It had also been deemed my father’s office, but he worked in his actual office at another house (which he’d converted into office space) or at the dining room table in our house. For years the room was (mostly) unused, while my sister and I shared a room. 

When she moved out, I announced I was moving to a room of my own. 

I overtake it with yellow, a color that radiates. It says: This room will stand out. 

In my mind, I see the yellow clearly, but I can’t name it.  There are hints of it in Chiura Obata’s Grand Canyon and The Enthronement Drum, a cover for Japan. I look for it in the chapter on yellow in Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette. She writes gamboge is “the brightest yellow imaginable, almost fluorescent,” but it’s not quite there, not my yellow. Kassia St. Clair in The Secret Lives of Color shows me it could be Acid Yellow, the color of the original smiley face, or Chrome Yellow, the yellow of Van Gogh’s sunflowers.  But Soane’s yellow is the only one I relate to, that connects me to what I’ve seen before. 

I don’t remember much about my room, except the color. In it, I did feel at ease like soft butter melting on toast or tart and sweet in the right ratio in lemon pound cake. 

According to Gosling, Soane even “designed lanterns with yellow stain-glassed sections, so that the sculptures would be bathed in what he called Mediterranean glow.” He says, “The drawing room was intended to make guests feel like they were walking into the sunniness of Rome or Pompeii.”  I consider how instinct drove my intention. The same for Soane or the other way around?   

In “The Most Modern 18th-Century Room You’ve Ever Seen,” Elizabeth Anne Hartmann writes, “Soane’s cheekiness is in simplification.”  

“Cheek” is necessary as we narrow our options? Settle into intention? For me, it seems unavoidable when we audaciously trust our choices. Soane asks for his to live in perpetuity. Reconnecting with mine is enough. My yellow room, like Soane’s, is a place and a moment in time. From it, I begin to understand color as a container, storytelling beyond words. Now, it’s a touchstone, an object, embedded with stories, a multi-layered, unresolved, circuitous guide.

I am in a yellow gold kitchen in an artist-friend’s house in Winter Park. It is probably 1983—Elliott, my mentor, died in 1980. When he left London in 1979,  he said he’d be there for me. It is the first time, but not the last, I will feel this deep fatigue. 

I sit at a small table with my friend, and her mother, a psychic, whom I am meeting for the first time. We drink sweaty lemonade. The air is a weak yellow but heavy. My friend’s mother says, “I don’t usually do this, especially with someone I’ve just met, but there is a man sitting with you. He is all white—white skin, white hair, white beard—and he says he won’t leave until I tell you he is still with you.”

The gold tones in the room conflict with the stark white she says she sees. I nod my head but don’t believe her. My experience is when someone dies they are not with you. They are gone. I resist the cheekiness in her simplification. 

I step out of the Soane Museum and onto Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

What if I had let myself believe her? Felt that white with me? 

I see this in London’s gray-white light: Elliott, fearful in the dark, reaches for a sheet of paper. He finds a white envelop on his mud-yellow nightstand, and writes “love, Elliott.”  

The yellow room is past, but the surety within it? I just have to find that envelop—or do I? 

Here’s my leap. Please leap with me.

“Yellow Room” is truly a work in process. For a long time, I wasn’t sure it was a work in progress. I have a podcast in which I talk about it. I gave a conference presentation on it. I have at least six different versions of it. For years, I have not been able to complete it. 

I spent too much time trying to understand yellow (maybe someday I’ll write a piece about that). I stubbornly kept trying to connect the yellow rooms and Elliott through color. I kept learning more (adding information and details), while the piece was asking me—and I kept dodging the question—what does yellow mean to you? But finally, I saw it—for me, this piece was not just about what yellow is but about why Soane and I used it. When I got that, I was able to more fully hear this sentence: “Soane’s cheekiness is in simplification.” I began to see how (1) trust (a form of surety) and mistrust/not being sure permeated the piece, and (2) trust is often, maybe inherently, cheekiness (an audacious act).  What I saw gave me new perspectives. I relied on them and let them guide my writing.  

What I never lost trust in was this—the disparate parts of this piece (the visit to the Soane Museum, my remembrance of my yellow room, and my friend’s mother telling me she saw Elliott all in white sitting with me) belonged/would all work in it. My instinct about that, like my trust in yellow itself, was certain. 

Fun fact: I play with the present tense as a cheeky act of simplification. I only felt able to choose it though once I knew more about why I was creating this work. 

Do you have a piece that’s partial, incomplete, sitting in a drawer because it’s easier to put away than work with?  I hope what I’ve shared here might give you something to use or consider, but mostly I hope you’ll take it out once more—and see what happens. 

Oh, and--is this piece complete? For now, I’ve finished it, and I trust that.  

For more on the Soane Museum.

Items quoted are from “The Most Modern 18th-Century Room You’ve Ever Seen” by Elizabeth Hartmann.

Artwork by Neil Freese