‘Of Yellow’ responds to the French sonnet entitled ‘Voyelles’ by Arthur Rimbaud, in which the poet describes the ‘colours’ of the vowels: ‘A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles' — (i.e. A is black; E is white; I is red; U is green; O is blue). Christian Bök has created a polychromic translation of this work by the Symbolist sonneteer, replacing every vowel in the French sonnet, with a bar that corresponds to the colour of the vowel, reserving the colour ‘gray’ for all other glyphs and spaces (letters, periods, etc.), thus converting the poem itself into an abstract painting according to the schema described by Arthur Rimbaud.
