
Exhibition
The Yellowing
We are pleased to be welcoming back to the gallery, artist Keith Frake, whose work for this exhibition has evolved over the last three years and has mainly been influenced by his interest in early Christian painting, the apocalyptic images from the Book of Revelations and the Book of Enoch. The physical and psychological processes of Alchemy are also a major influence, as is, the colour symbolism in the poetry of Georg Trakl. One of the main differences between this sequence of work and previous pieces is the inclusion of a wider variety of colour, especially those used by Trakl, but mainly yellow and gold. 'My excursion into gold paint was stimulated by Byzantine imagery and icons and yellowing as part of the alchemical process’ . Until about the fifteenth or sixteenth century, yellow (otherwise called citrinitas or xanthosis) fell into disuse within the domain of Alchemy, thus leaving only three colours black, white and red. The transitional process, the yellowing stage between the white and red , was neglected. Some argue that the original quaternity was transformed into a trinity to bring it into line with Christian theology. Newtons chromatic prism curiously locates yellow-green in the centre of its spectrum as does the median position of da Vinci’s six primary colours (black, white, red, yellow, green and blue.) Today the green-yellow of Chloris, which for the Greeks described the earth goddess Demeter, reappears in electrical wiring where a spiralling green and yellow insulation signifies the grounding or earth line, neither positive nor negative. Our response towards yellow is often ambivalent, from the etymological link of Yellow with yolk to the metaphorical association with spring flowers, sunlight and honey etc. The German gelb and the Latin galbus and galbinus derive from the roots meaning radiant and shining, like gold. On the other hand, however Edgar Allan Poe associated it with craziness and troubled minds; Kandinsky with violent lunacy; for Van Gogh and Gauguin it represented love. The Alchemists however associated it with putrefaction and corruption. The Yellowing is a process in time, ending in staining and decay. The processes Frake uses, include burning, the boiling of paint and other industrial substances and the other actions he inflicts on the work, necessitates very long drying periods. During this period the whites often transform and degrade into a variety of yellows and browns. More generally many other changes occur in the colour and texture of the work’s surface. Overall, there is a feeling of fragility, unpredictability and impermanence in the work which may in fact reflect Frake's own fear and anxiety for the future. There will be an evening launch on 18th October 6 -8 pm and the exhibition will run until 2nd November.
📅 19 October – 2 November 2025
📍 Artizan Collective
🔵 Coming Soon
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