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| Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), oil painting, 1988. Source |
Rebecca Solnit, on the color blue, from, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 2006
1 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.
2 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.
3 “If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrivals.”
Giotto di Bondone, known as Giotto, frescoes in the Arena Chapel, 1304. Fresco. Source
Marcel Proust on the BLUE of Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel (more on Proust)
4 …after walking in the glare of the sun across the garden of the Arena, I entered the Giotto chapel the entire ceiling of which and the background of the frescoes are so blue that it seems as though the radiant day has crossed the threshold with the human visitor, and has come in for a moment to stow away in the shade and coolness its pure sky, of a slightly deeper blue now that it is rid of the sun’s gilding, as in those brief spells of respite that interrupt the finest days, when, without our having noticed any cloud, the sun having turned his gaze elsewhere for a moment, the azure, more exquisite still, grows deeper. In this sky, upon the blue-washed stone, angels were flying with so intense a celestial, or at least an infantile ardour, that they seemed to be birds of a peculiar species that had really existed, that must have figured in the natural history of biblical and Apostolic times, birds that never fail to fly before the saints when they walk abroad; 5 there are always some to be seen fluttering above them, and as they are real creatures with a genuine power of flight, we see them soar upwards, describe curves, ‘loop the loop’ without the slightest difficulty, plunge towards the earth head downwards with the aid of wings which enable them to support themselves in positions that defy the law of gravitation, and they remind us far more of a variety of bird or of young pupils of Garros practising the vol-plané, than of the angels of the art of the Renaissance and later periods whose wings have become nothing more than emblems and whose attitude is generally the same as that of heavenly beings who are not winged
Giotto's The Sacrifice of Joachim and The Dream of Joachim (1304-6)
Carol Mavor on Giotto and Blue from Blue Mythologies
6 When entering the ‘semidarkness’ of Giotto’s Arena Chapel, blue is ‘the first color to strike the visitor’. This was ‘unusual in Giotto's tirne because of its brilliance'. It takes your breath away. One is struck by a feeling of pleasure that is as enchanting as the azure background of the surrounding walls, which gives way to narrative depictions of the lives of the Virgin and Christ. The blue walls are as dazzling as the sapphire ceiling above, which is patterned with stunning stars and roundels of the son of God, his mother and Prophets.
7 Indeed, in this blue cocoon writ large, Giotto has 'transplanted'3 the sky on to the walls and ceiling. The paradise above is an unreal, moonlit blue, twinkling with painted gold stars that have been arranged with the skill of a first-class patissier. The stars appear like Moravian cookies on a vast midnight-blue baking sheet; their divineness is a taste of heaven. To enter the chapel is to fall into another world, a blue one, as blue as our own 'blue marble'. The effect of Giotto's blue is bliss: what Julia Kristeva calls 'jouissance'. 'Giotto's Joy' is a most-fitting title to Kristeva's essay on the artist's frescoes (1300-1305), perfectly denoting the Florentine painter's radical and breathtaking use of blue.
8 Curiously, there is 'no rivalry between background and figure':4 the effect is positively dynamic. The characters (not too large, not too small) tear themselves away from the blue to touch us: they come to us out of the blue, while (at the same time) these same figures recede into the blue. Likewise, the blue foundation cascades out to soak us in its pigment. Yet, this nearly unadulterated blue also recedes behind the figures. Figure and ground push and pull (like Hans Hofmann's use of pure colours in his abstract paintings), rise and fall, like a song, like the sea and the sky, like the gloomy contentment of a melancholic, the nostalgic who is joyful-sad.
Giotto's blue gives us wings: we invisibly sprout them, so to speak, and achieve a 'genuine power of flight'. 5 Gliding like an angel, or, even like a student of the great aeronaut Roland Garros, we join celestial creatures in 'looping the loop', as in the panel The Pieta.
9 It is as if Yves Klein has gone back in time to miraculously join hands with Giotto. Flying is blue. It is as if Giotto had gone forward in time to miraculously join hands with Yves Klein. Dreamily, I alight inlo Klein’s Anthropometry entitled 10 People Begin to Fly (1961), made by, perhaps, the bluest artist of all time, a boyish man who really believed that he could fly. ('He was sure he could fly’, so claimed his wife.7)
11 Giotto's blue gives us a bath, a pool, a sea, a river, as in the panel, The Baptism of Christ. Here, the nearly naked, full-length body of Christ stands in turquoise-blue water; its colour is oddly reminiscent of David Hockney's early paintings of Los Angeles pooIs. These turquoises, swimming-pool blues of Giotto's River Jordan, also evoke those particular cyans of the instant Polaroid picture.
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12 Returning to Giotto's The Baptism of Christ, I see a similar primitive Polaroidicity in the spirit of Giotto's fresco. Above Christ is a flash of light suggesting the magical creation of an image; like those legends from the nineteenth century concerning flashes of lightning imprinting extraordinary images on glass window panes'.18 Within the boom of light is the foreshortened hand of God, in a delicate pink sleeve. God is reaching down out of the blue. God is in touch ( or nearly so) with his secreted double (Christ, who is man in God's own image). God as, and within, a flash of light evokes the etymology of photography (light-writing) and its spirit (saving the dead), centuries before the medium's invention. With a modern vision towards the photograph, which he would never know, 'Giotto hearkens ... the Byzantine-inspired conception of baptism as photismos, literally illumination”
David Hockney, The Splash, 1966
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