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Mark Rocha - Official

Yellow

I inhale my yellow paint,
I consume it drop by drop;
I inject my yellow paint,
So the pain inside can stop.
I abuse my yellow paint,
I rub it on my skin -
And when I'm done my yellow paint
Will colour me within.


Everybody knows Vincent Van Gogh. Even if they can't name a single painting, they know of him because of his eccentric behaviour which unfortunately became his legacy. "The painter who was so in love, he cut his ear off" is one of the most widely circulated stories. A lesser talked of one however, is his appetite for paint. 
As the story goes, Van Gogh would often 'eat' paint, in order to 'feel' what the colour represented. The most popular of these was yellow paint. Yellow represents happiness, and Van Gogh was known to have eaten yellow paint so he could feel happiness. His peers saw him as an imbecile, and one who would not amount to much. They thought he was crazy - because don't you have to be? To eat paint?
Centuries later, many critics and scholars believe that the illusive Van Gogh wasn't as eccentric as people made him out to be. Sure we don't go around eating yellow paint to feel happy, but we're not short of substitutes either. Drugs, sex, alcohol, cigarettes ... Love. We all have our own version of yellow paint that others may look at and find wasteful and incomprehensible; but it makes sense to us. Just as eating a tube of yellow paint made sense to Van Gogh. We pursue it, we consume it, and we wallow in it, hoping it would cure us of every mental disease we refuse to admit we have, so that when we're through, we're just a slightly richer shade of 'yellow' inside. 

So my question to you is, what is your yellow paint?

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