Blue: Earth’s Finest Colour

Perhaps the earth’s purest color is blue, as the old European mythology expresses. It is also the most dominant color in nature. Nobody can deny the charm of blue sky that touches sea with its luminous reflection in water. Range of blue may be mentioned such as Prussian Blue, Navy Blue, Cobalt Blue, Pthalo Blue, Ocean Blue and many more. Artists’ range of blue will be even larger. The purest form of blue is Ultramarine, or French Ultramarine – the most spiritual, deeply mythical and intensely historical. The color blue expresses a broad array of warm, friendly, and blissful feelings. It represents both the sky and the sea and is associated with open space, liberty, instinct, thoughts, motivation, and compassion. Blue also denote depth, trust, allegiance, honesty, wisdom, confidence, firmness, trust, and aptitude.

Blue is technically a color, whether we use it or see in nature. It is one of the basic three colors in color wheel. All other color shades appear out from combination of basic colors. One set of basic color is RGB (Red, Green and Blue). In computer, each is represented by a digital value between 0 to 255 (intensity). This is also known as additive color – used generally for viewing. The other type is CYMK (Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and Black) also known as subtractive color – generally used in printing. As student of science, one will explain it as a fixed range of EMR (electromagnetic radiation), wavelength between 0.45µm to 0.50µm of the visible range. The reason for the color of blue sky lies here – the blue wavelengths are scattered more widely by the oxygen and nitrogen molecules, and thus more blue comes to our eyes. The sky color is reflected in clear seawater to give it a hue of blue as well.

Pablo Picasso, a devout communist, was the greatest artist of his time, born in 1881 in Barcelona and died in Paris in 1973. Most of his paintings were created during his stay in Paris reflected his isolation, lonely living and the death of one of his closest friends Carles Cassagemas, who was born in 1880 in Barcelona. He was also a good painter in his short span of life. Both of them moved to Paris in 1900. Cassagemas was known more for his friendship with Picasso. He got friendship with a beautiful women Germaine, whom he loved and became most important model for Picaso’s paintings latter on. After the death of Cassagemas she started living with Picasso.  Suicidal death of Cassagemas in 1901 influenced Picaso’s life so intensively that was clearly visible in a good number of paintings created by Picasso during 1901 to 1904 – which is known as blue part of his life. Picasso got severe depression, was traumatized and became schizophrenic. He started paintings where blue strongly dominated his emotions, and all those paintings could be clearly grouped in one class. Some of those paintings are Le Gourmet (1901),  Femme aux Bras Croisés (1901), Femme assise (1902), Dissepparat (1903), La Vie (1903), The Old Guitarist (1903), Blindman’s Meal (1903), Portrait of Soler, Portrait of Susanne Bloch and still many more. Blue symbolizes hell in Egyptian tradition. That means death. Picasso did not chose blue himself, rather blue appeared in his works at that time and context. In all those paintings, shades were darker such as night blue-to-blue black to black blue - reflects Picasso’s schizophrenic mind.

Venice is a lagoon in the north Adriatic and used to be a busy trade center that connected many parts of Asia and Africa with Europe. About a thousand years back a mysterious ship arrived in Venice from the east with a load of a new stuff called Lapis Lazuli – a precious stone that was mined in Badakshan region in north Afghanistan. Merchants from Europe and Asia Minor used the silk rout to travel about 4000 km from the east until Turkey and then took that ship to reach Venice – gateway to Europe. During the medieval time (although it spans from 5th to 15th century but 14th to 15th or until 17th century was more important historically), church used to control everything of human life. Due to rareness, Lapis Lazuli was costly at that time and was traded in exchange of gold. Lapis  Lazuli is the purest source of color ultramarine (blue). Within decades, it became popular in paintings. However, as blue used to be traditionally spiritual color in Venice and Italy, church controlled its use like all other aspects. The stone contained the color very intensively and started changing the art at the church walls and ceilings dramatically, and paved a new way of future pattern of paintings. It was strange that blue had no place in the western art at that time and it was not found in the earthy colors in prehistoric cave paintings. Greeks even did not have a word for blue. Romans did not have time to use it in the wall paintings in Pompeii.

Even in the earlier part of medieval ages, use of blue was feeble. The stone was crushed and the powder was put in gum Arabic and water to get the pure pigments of ultramarine. By the late medieval age, blue became central in all church paintings. The church ceilings were so nicely decorated with golden stars in blue backdrops - were fantastic. All the biblical paintings had a predominant use of blue and gradually it became a standard. See the paintings Last Supper (1490), Giovanni Belini (1505), Pesaro Madonna (1526), Miracle of the Slave (1548), where one would find the dominance of blue as a new pattern in painting. Soon the use of blue was liberated from spiritual control of church and spread across Europe in regular paintings.

Blue exists all around us – from the sea to the sky but we can not touch; we are so deeply in it, that often our eyes ignore its existence. A puzzling truth is that blue was believed to be a heavenly color initially but for the first time Apollo 8 sent us earth’s photo from space which shows earth a wonderful blue dominated environment. Therefore, it is an earthy color but reached thematically to its present status after a long historical transformation - from nature to regular life, and the driving force was a piece of Lapis Lazuli.

 
Professor Raquib Ahmed
PhD is Vice Chancellor of
Fareast International University.