SEA NOTES

A Study in Blue

Ahh, the color blue — a color that conjures up feelings of melancholia, but also is a color of spirituality and transcendence. It can represent space outside of ourselves, a space beyond the seas and the horizon. It can be bestowed as the holiest of the hues, enough so that in the 12th century, the Roman Catholic Church dictated that artists in Italy, and subsequently all of Europe, depict the Virgin Mary in blue. In Egypt, blue represented the divine essence of being, and the god Amun was depicted with blue skin. In the Hindu religion, many deities are portrayed with blue skin, Krishna, Shiva, and Rama, but it is thought that it was not the skin color but the Aura that they emitted.

With the blue sky and oceans of blue, it might come as a surprise that it is the rarest color in the visible spectrum. With fruits and vegetables, there are blueberries and blue corn, but, when run under a spectrometer the color is on the violet side and not a true blue. There are bluebirds but the feathers only appear as being blue. There is no blue pigment in the feathers, the color comes from the structures in the feathers that scatter the light and appear blue. In antiquity blue was not recognized as a color in its own right, Greek poets described the ocean as being green, brown, or “The Wine-Dark Sea.” Pliny the Elder, in his writings, recognized the four primary colors as red, yellow, black, and white. The Romans associated the color blue with mourning and also as a color of barbarians. The Celt and the Germans would paint their faces blue to intimidate and terrify their enemies.

Blue is not a naturally occurring pigment like the earth colors. To get the pigment one needs to manufacture the color, by grinding and processing minerals like lapis lazuli or azurite, or through chemical synthesis. The Egyptians manufacture Egyptian blue with a combination of silica, lime, and copper and add an alkali. First synthesized in the Fourth Dynasty, it remained popular until the end of the Roman Empire when it fell out of use. With the popularity of Egyptian blue fading, the knowledge of how the color was synthesized was lost.

The Romans had several words for blue, two, in particular, stuck in European languages, Blavus, which derived from Blau, the German word for blue. Another Roman word for blue, azereus, came from the Arabic word, lazeward, which became azure. A common theory for this late naming of blue is that you only need to name something once you can dye things, once you can separate the color from the object. Dyeing things blue and developing a blue pigment came late in the development of colors and this is reflected in languages around the world with the late naming of the color.

In the early Middle Ages, blue played a minor role in the arts. This changed in 1130-40 when Abbot Sugar rebuilt Saint Denis Basilica in France. He believed that light was the visible expression of the Holy Spirit and was a guiding principle behind the design of Saint-Denis. In place of the heavy dividing walls of previous Romanesque style apses and ambulatories were slender columns, supported by flying buttresses and a high clerestory. This allowed for the addition of large stained-glass windows which were made with cobalt glass, which became known as bleu de St. Denis, the light, combined with the red glass filled the church with a beautiful, heavenly bluish violet light, the Holy Spirit.

This became the marvel of the Catholic world, emblematic of divine purity. With the travels of pilgrims word spread of this wonder, and its impact influenced other churches which became the Gothic style. More cathedrals and stained glass followed, and churches like Chartes and Saint Chappelle became masterpieces of architecture and stained glass.

Another occurrence that elevated the use of blue during the Middle Ages was the development of the technique for making ultra-marine. The pigment began to appear around 1200, made from lapis lazuli, a rare mineral with the sole source being in Afghanistan. In grinding the stone, however, the color vanishes, so a process was developed to create the deep ultra-marine hue, but it was a very time-consuming and difficult which added to its expense. It involved mixing the ground lapis with melted wax, oils, and resins and forming a paste. The paste was wrapped in a cloth and kneaded in a solution of lye. This process was repeated several times and the blue particles would be washed out and settled at the bottom of the solution.

In the renaissance, blue became more prominent in paintings, and artists like Raphael, Michelangelo, and Albrecht Durer in the north utilized the color on their palates. Artists were able to represent the world with an aerial perspective, depth, and shadows with the use of blue. The problem that these artists had was that ultra-marine, with its rarity and labor intensive production, was expensive, more costly than gold. There were other choices for blue, azurite, and smalt for example, but they did not compare to the beauty and depth of quality of ultramarine. To use ultramarine was also a sign of wealth and to bestow virtue on the painting, as apparent in the blue robe of the Virgin Mary.

The first synthesized blue was the Egyptian blue, a recipe that was lost sometime in the Middle Ages. The first modern chemically produced pigment was discovered by accident. Two people in 1705, working in the same lab made an astonishing mistake. One of the characters was Johann Conrad Dippel, an alchemist born in Germany in 1673 in the actual Castle Frankenstein. He is believed to be the inspiration for Mary Shelly’s book Frankenstein because of his belief that the living could be transferred by way of a funnel into a corpse. He shared a lab in Berlin with a Swiss pigment maker, Johann Jacob Diesbach, a fellow scientist specializing in the lucrative business of making pigments. One day in 1750, when making cochineal red lake he used some potash borrowed from Dippel that had been contaminated by some oil that Dippel had made. The alkali in the mixture of cochineal reacted to Dippel’s oil that had been prepared from blood, and to the surprise of Diesbach and Dippel the pigment came out a deep blue instead of the red that they were expecting, now known as Prussian Blue.

In a matter of a few years, the pigment was made commercially and readily available. This discovery of a stable blue that is lower cost and easier to manufacture than ultramarine created a “blue fever” in Europe. It also spread around the world making its way to China in the early 1800s. With its vivid hue, larger tonal range, and foreign nature it exploded in popularity just as it had in Europe, eventually making its way into Japan. The Japanese artist Hokusai was one of the first artists in Japan to use Prussian blue

With his prints, most famous is his Great wave off Kanagawa, Prussian blue lent itself to expressing depth in water and creating a sense of distance, atmospheric qualities that are important in seascapes and landscapes. Hokusai also abandoned the Japanese isometric view and the practice of using motifs that were scaled according to their importance and adopted a more European style of perspective.

Japanese isolationist policies were lifted in 1853 and with that the spread of Japanese woodblock prints which were used as wrapping paper. The Japanese Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition in 1867, showcased many Japanese prints and thus elevated the artistic status and developed a craze, especially among the French artists, Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec borrowed heavily from these prints. One artist who has the most identifiable painting that owes everything to Hokusai’s Wave is Vincent Van Gogh and his painting Starry Night. From the prominent color to the shape of the sky reflecting the Hokusai’s Wave projected the deep emotional impact that Van Gogh had felt with Hokusai.

From being a color of the sacred, emblematic of the divine, to the profane, emotional quality like that expressed in The Starry Night, the color blue through its history has meant many things to many people. It is statistically the most popular color in the world, more than fifty percent view the color as their favorite. It can evoke melancholy and it can also express timelessness, it can represent space outside of normal life and it creates a sense of space and distance beyond the horizon. It is the color of the sky, the oceans, and the seas, it is on all of our palates in more varieties than one hundred years to a millennium. Without the fabulous blue, we would not be (ultra) marine artists.

— by Stephen Bluto