I find the color blue magnetic. Not necessarily the sky, but in the material world. I find myself being drawn to blue art, blue objects, to others whom I recognize as also being pulled in by blue: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Yves Klien’s body of work. Picasso’s isn’t the only blue period in history—think of Delftware, the ceramics of the Ming dynasty, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. In doing a deep dive into the color, I’m curious to understand why it’s so magnetic, why so much art has been made in honor of this color.
I gather bits of blue about me like a bower bird. Nearly everything in this issue is something I’ve felt compelled to tuck away and save so I can remember it. Now, finally, I’m gathering the pieces together to see what emerges when they’re in conversation with each other.
This summer I finished reading Kassia St. Clair’s The Secret Lives of Color which tells the history and science of color through anecdotes on different colors. In her chapter on how precious and revolutionary ultramarine was, she mentions Sossoferrato’s “Virgin at Prayer” and I remember Googling this painting and just gazing it. The blue is so powerful, such a show of force and beauty in the composition of the painting, that it seems to celebrate blue itself more than its actual subject—blue is the most sacred thing in this painting. Mary is often portrayed in blue because it represents purity, but Sossoferrato’s blue uses a small fortune of lapis lazuli as if trying to prove a point about his patron’s devotion and wealth (or both—according to the Church, money wiped away sins and proved piety). St. Clair’s book tells story after story of the lengths we’ve gone to (the destruction we’ve wrought) for color. Even if I find wealth disgusting, especially in the historical context of starving peasants, the blue is remarkable—despite being 380 years old, it’s as vibrant as if it were just painted, as if you are in the room with her.
A few years ago, I was listening to Abbi Jacobson’s podcast, A Piece of Work, and in one episode on monochromatics, the conversation explores loving and relating to a single color deeply. I remembered Jacobson saying she ‘wanted to love something the way Yves Klein loves blue’ (listening back, I realize I definitely made this wording up), and that misremembered comment inspired a line in a poem that became one of my favorites, and that string of ideas has now made me feel very close to Yves Klein’s work, which I didn’t really know before then. Does that happen to you, where a particular place or thing inspired you to create something, and maybe that something you made pushed you to be a better creator of whatever your craft is, so you feel, now, a deep, inexplicable attachment that particular thing that catalyzed your creative process?
Anyway, that’s how I came to love Yves Klein who loves blue. Klein worked with scientists to create a paint that would maintain its luminosity and depth when hung vertically. Klein defied genre—he considered his art to really be in the creation itself, saying his paintings were “the leftovers from my creative process, the ashes.” Often his paintings were performances. In the Anthropometries series, he wrote the “Monotone-Silence Symphony” for a full orchestra that played a single note for 20 minutes followed by 20 minutes of silence, followed by nude women painting themselves in International Klein Blue (later renamed “International Klein Nothingness”) and becoming “living brushes” on the canvas.
Lines, bars of a psychological prison . . . are our chains . . . They are our heredity, our education, our framework, our vices, our aspirations, our qualities, our wiles . . . Color, on the other hand, is free; it is instantly dissolved in space . . . And that is why, in my work, I refuse more and more emphatically the illusion of personality, the transient psychology of the linear, the formal, the structural. Evidently, the subject I am traveling toward is space, pure Spirit. —Yves Klein
For Klein, blue was both everything and nothing. Its perception becomes an idea and that’s the real art. I’ve realized through Klein that there’s a oneness and allness to blue. Working in only blue is a paradox: it’s a limitation that opens up Klein’s creative exploration that is expansive, so the color defies its own definitions.
In an essay about Klein, Rebecca Solnit writes, “Painting the world blue made it all terra incognita, indivisible and unconquerable, a ferocious act of mysticism.” Blue, Klein found, breaks all barriers and boundaries, to reach as close as humanly possible to touching “pure spirit.”
I’ve mentioned Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “The Blue of Distance,” in another Notions & Notes on longing, and maybe it’s not a coincidence that an author I love and consider a creative influence has shared my fascination with this color. Because blue occurs with distance in our perception, Solnit equates blue with longing:
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.
I spend as much time as I can looking out at mountains. When I was a kid, I’d try to focus on the distant mountains, and my thoughts would wander, so I’d bring them back to the mountains. I concluded the mountains were too great for human consciousness, too much to hold in your head and sight for long. These wandering thoughts are a common phenomenon of meditation, though my meditation at the time was accidental. Solnit’s description of distant-mountain blue elicits for me that “yes!” of reading something that puts my own experience into words and ways of seeing I didn’t have until reading it on the page. I love when writing can do that.
Solnit isn’t the only author to try to understand the emotional response to blue. Goethe tried to catalog the emotions of colors and said this about blue:
As the upper sky and distant mountains appear blue, so a blue surface seems to retire from us. But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue—not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.
Another of my favorite authors has also, famously, spent quite a bit of time contemplating the color blue. In Bluets, Maggie Nelson responds to Goethe’s definition of blue, writing:
Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?
Sometimes, though, blue is more than an emotion. In the “Piece of Work’” podcast, Jacobson discusses Klein with Questlove, who has a sort of synesthesia perception of Klein’s blue as a musical note, which Jacobson connects to Klein’s single-note symphony (I’d be curious i. Vladamir Nabokov was a synesthete, and in Speak Memory, he describes sounds of blue shades:
Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl. Adjacent tints do not merge, and diphthongs do not have special colors of their own, unless represented by a single character in some other language (thus the fluffy-gray, three-stemmed Russian letter that stands for sh, a letter as old as the rushes of the Nile, influences its English representation)…
I guess what I’m trying to do here is imagine what it would be like to put Maggie Nelson, Rebecca Solnit, Abbie Jacobson, Questlove, Goethe, and Nabokov all in a room with a window with a view and listen to them talk about blue with each other.
The news of the first new blue in 200 years got sort of lost in the shuffle of January 2021 (no idea what else was going on more important), but YInMn Blue, named for it’s mineral components, was officially approved for commercial sale that month. It was invented by accident in a university lab and is remarkable because it doesn’t fade when mixed with oil or water like all other blue pigments. When I think about YInMn Blue, there’s something almost disturbing about its vibrancy and it reminds me of how rarely blue is found in nature. But the fact that it was an accident discovered from just a few metals also reminds me how much we still have to discover, that the world and its makings are still mostly a mystery, despite all our fancy research labs.
So this has been a selection of the bits of blue art I’ve gathered about me. Rather than understanding the meaning of blue, I’ve tried to understand why I, and so many others, are so drawn to it. For different writers and artists, it has represented luxury, lost love, purity, longing, limitlessness, scientific breakthrough, mystery, and sound. If I’ve learned anything from this exercise, it’s that blue is all of these things and everything. Maybe, instead of understanding it, I should just give into the pull of blue, let myself be lulled into blue. I imagine it feels like flight.
That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless. —Maggie Nelson
On the Color Blue
It was such a pleasure reading this essay, Jaime! It reminded me of one of Maria Popova's musings from the Marginarian -- always thought-provoking and timeless. Thank you for sharing! It's nice to be inspired to think deeper about the objects and ideas that unconsciously draw us in.
Jaime, A wonderful essay on blue. Below is a passage from Georgia O’Keefe that speaks to the magic, the necessity of blue. Cheers, Pam
“It was in the fall of 1915 that I first had the idea that what I had been taught was of little value to me except for the use of my materials as a language– charcoal, pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, pastel, and oil. I had become fluent with them when I was so young that they were simply another language that I handled easily. But what to say with them? I had been taught to work like others and after careful thinking I decided that I wasn’t going to spend my life doing what had already been done.
I hung on the wall the work I had been doing for several months. Then I sat down and looked at it. I could see how each painting or drawing has been done according to one teacher or another, and I said to myself, “I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me– shapes and ideas so near to me– so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.” I decided to start anew– to strip away what I had been taught– to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times in my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing– alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown– no one to satisfy but myself. I began with charcoal and paper and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white. I believe it was June before I needed blue.”
From the book: Georgia O’Keefe