May 28, 2026

"I remember something"

Emily Farranto

May 29, 2026

∙ Paid

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Blurry image of my painting of a yellow dumpster from the early aughts, painting with Daniel off Erie Boulevard

Hi

Four things:

I am merging my two Substack publications. All this means is that instead of having two—which is confusing—there will be one, under the name Village Disco. Probably starting next week. It should be seamless for subscribers.
Have you seen the current show finite body, infinite field at Good Children? It features the work of Brooke Cassady, Rachel Jones Deris, and Ariya Aladjem Wolf. I will post more about that show later, but because I am thinking about yellow paint today, I want to share this painting by Rachel Jones Deris.
I will be participating in a talk with artists Neil Hancock and Kyle McLean Next Friday evening, June 12, 6 PM at Sibyl Gallery. So that’s going to be fun.
I was thinking about something my friend Daniel Atyim said about yellow a long time ago. I wrote about it below

Thank you so much for reading or even just looking at the pictures.

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PS: It’s late. I’ll drop the audio version tomorrow.

Yellow

I was painting with Daniel just off Erie Boulevard in Syracuse, early 2000s. We were in graduate school, taking Sarah McCoubrey’s landscape painting class. The class of six or ten students usually met in a given location, usually out in the country, but that day it was just Daniel and me. Daniel was from LA, and he was kind and intense. Years later, he helped me move out of a problematic apartment in New York. More than his van, I appreciated his you’d better give her her deposit back-energy.

Daniel was committed to painting and I appreciated that in a painting program where almost half the grads had abandoned painting in favor of other materials and modes (like Vaseline). Some of this was due to the fact that half the Painting faculty had given up the ghost of painting. Sarah McCoubrey was actually a Foundations professor, but her faith in painting ran deeper than most.

I learned to paint in high school and had little technical training after that. It was years of trial and error. Back in high school, I was taught to paint from life, from observation. In my last year of undergrad, I realized I didn’t want to paint what was in front of me. The things I wanted to paint were lodged in the near past. The photographs I took compulsively were not quite adequate, but painting them was a kind of return, a kind of holding. Mostly, I painted places I had been—I didn’t think of them as landscapes but places—in a palette that had narrowed close to monochrome.

Sarah’s landscape painting class was, in a way, like revisiting basics, like starting from the beginning. Painting the landscape in front of me, I was free from the slightly bruised feeling of memory that usually informed my subject matter and practice.

The course syllabus recommended a traditional palette (a warm blue and a cool blue, a warm red and a cool red, a warm yellow and a cool yellow, green, sap I think, black, and white). In the view I was painting, there was a large yellow dumpster. The day off Erie Boulevard was overcast and the yellow of the dumpster was very yellow. I was grappling with the color, its hue and variation where it receded into a not very dark shadow. I probably said I was struggling with it. Daniel came over, took a look and said,

“It’s yellow. Paint it yellow.”

“From the tube?”

“Why not?”

I had learned in high school not to use paint directly from the tube, to mix the color. This is reasonable advice, especially to a new painter.* Daniel pointed out that the dumpster was painted with industrial paint.

Mine is a stupid little painting without a credible point of view, without risk or confidence. I only have this blurry image of it, but the memory and the message have gotten clearer over time: no lesson is true or permanent. And we need to interrogate our habits now and then to make sure they are serving us.

Daniel is still kind, intense, and passionate about painting. He lives in Au Clair, Wisconsin.