Blue Distance: Amanda McCavour (original) (raw)
Blue in Eighteenth-Century England: Pigments and Usages
XVII-XVIII, 2018
Interest in the history of colour has been growing in recent decades, with prominent books by John Gage and Philip Ball published in 1993 and 2003 respectively. In addition to these encyclopaedic works, which cover various aspects of the subject, other research has been conducted on specific issues concerning colour. The most popular work in the domain of colour linguistics is by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969), which is devoted to the evolution of colour vocabularies, along with one on the semantics of colour by Minoru Ohtsuki (2000). It is worth noting that blue occupies a considerable place in the entire body of research on colour, probably even the leading one, with scholars of different domains having shown a particular interest in this regard. Michel Pastoureau (2001) looked at the matter from the point of view of a historian; François Delamare (2007) was a scientist who specialised in the properties of the surface of materials, and wrote about blue pigments and their chemistry; and Carol Mavor (2013), a social scientist, discussed her emotive responses to occurrences of blue in literature and the visual arts. One particularly interesting interpretation of blue was suggested by Breanne Fallon (2014), who noted that colours-and blue in particular-can take on the role of a mediator in religious experiences. An explanation for this attractiveness of blue can be found in the controversial history of its materiality and meaning which, depending on the time and location, has fluctuated from signifying spirituality and heaven to evil and hell. Another possible motivation for the widespread interest in blue in academic circles is the fact that statistically (fig. 1), it is the leading colour of preference worldwide, according to a YouGov survey conducted in 2014, and other statistical data discussed by Eva Heller (45).
Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (essay collection), ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (University of Minnseota Press), 2013
This essay is an attempt, and perhaps a failed one, to think about depression as a shared creative endeavor, as a trans-corporeal blue (and blues) ecology that would bind humans, nonhumans, and stormy weather together in what Tim Ingold has called a meshwork, where “beings do not propel themselves across a ready-made world but rather issue forth through a world-in-formation, along the lines of their relationships.” In this enmeshment of the “strange strangers” of Timothy Morton’s dark ecology, “[t]he only way out is down” and art’s “ambiguous, vague qualities will help us to think things that remain difficult to put into words.” It may be, as Morton has also argued, that while “personhood” is real, nevertheless, “[b]oth the surface and the depth of our being are ambiguous and illusory.” And “still weirder, this illusion might have actual effects.” I want to see if it might be possible to cultivate this paradoxical interface (literally, “between faces”) between illusion and effects, especially with regard to feeling blue, a condition I believe is a form of a deeply empathic enmeshment with a world that suffers its own “sea changes” and which can never be seen as separate from the so-called individuals who supposedly only populate (“people”) it. Is depression, sadness, melancholy -- feeling blue -- always only taking place within the interior spaces of individually-bounded forms of sentience and physiology, or is it in the world somehow, a type of weather or atmosphere, with the becoming-mad of the human mind only one of its many effects (a form of attunement to the world’s melancholy)? Could a more heightened and consciously attuned sense of the emanations and radio signals of “blue” sensations, feelings, and climates enable constructive interpersonal, social, and other blue collaborations that might lead to valuable modes of better advancing “into / the sense of the weather, the lesson of / the weather”? Here, there is no environment, only fluid space (from tears to rain to oceans and everything in between) and in Ingold’s formulation (following Andy Clark), everything leaks. Themes of exile, and of moving through and inhabiting furnished and unfurnished worlds (where life is played out upon the either hostile or hospitable surfaces of the crust of the earth), although powerfully attractive in Western cultural narratives, break down under the pressure of the fact that everything is always already an “intimate register of wind and weather.”
Accessing Blue in Maggie Nelson's Bluets
Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 2021
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) CAPACIOUS YORK UNIVERSITY Margaryta Golovchenko How can one simultaneously desire and fear a color? Moreover, how can this color function as an affect in a text that is completely devoid of images? These questions are central to Maggie Nelson's 2009 hybrid book Bluets, which focuses on tracing her relationship with and search for the color blue both physically and emotionally. Blue's function as an affect in Bluets proves just as ambivalent as the role it plays in Nelson's life, its significance twofold: for Nelson herself, as well as for its ability to entice the reader, who experiences the entirety of blue's multifaceted nature secondhand through Nelson's autotheoretical narrative. Bluets is thus a visually non-visual text, one that, perhaps problematically, decenters the idea that we need to physically see something in order to be affected by it. Nelson takes on the challenge of transmitting the affect of blue using words instead of images, a challenge that she does not quite live up to. This is due, in part, to the potential familiarity that readers may have with the few works of art that Nelson references, and even if that is not the case, the temptation to look them up online to correlate text and image looms over the text of Bluets. By relying only on vague descriptions of blue objects, spaces, and artworks, Nelson's text reveals that blue is not merely an attribute of a physical object. Rather, blue also exists as a dematerialized entity, capable of invoking adoration and repulsion in equal measure.
In the Name of Blue: Blue Joyce, Blue Gass, Blue Klein
Polysèmes, 2015
Blue as you enter it disappears. William Gass, On Being Blue, 1976 1 What follows runs in the small paronomastic interval between (in French) "couleur" and " couler"-an interval which cleaves color to what flows, comes off, seeps and follows suit: in other words to fluctile patterns, queer modalities running across boundaries, leaving grammatical categories ajar. The thin interval between "couleur" and "couler" emits no signs of being destined to evolve beyond the level of sheer surface resemblance or chance aural connections between two unrelated words spawned by two distinct Latin roots: colorem (color); colare: (to flow). Although in English no similar conflation seems possible, a number of comparably unstable patterns in the way the word "color" behaves can be traced. "Color" rubs elbows with a number of restless neighbours, such as a "colander", for example, an object which reveals a possible overlap between color and what seeps through, filters or leaks; or the verb "to color" used colloquially, with an adjective in tow (as in "color me beautiful" or "color me curious"), in which "coloring" equals calling, thus turning "color" into a pliant, stretchable term. Or again in Shakespeare's English, the term "hue" is repeatedly invited to follow unstable semantic lines, running as it often does in many sonnets from "hew" to "Hugh" to "you" and back. "Color" itself liberates a chain reaction of puns in the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet (where "collar" brings up "choler").
Colors & cultures : interdisciplinary explorations
Colors & cultures : interdisciplinary explorations, 2022
This is a bilingual collection of articles in English and in French by a group of international scholars who discuss the phenomenon of color in many different disciplines—which makes it possible to reflect on what the color experience means in various domains of human (and animal) life. Our contributions offer intercultural explorations from many corners of the color community. They deal with color as symbolism, in comparative linguistics, as a matter of feeling, cognition and epistemology, in Native American painting, about meanings of color in exemplary literary texts, in pop culture and fashion, in feminist argumentations, as an issue of the visual regimes of race in different art forms, of spirituality in Judeo-Christian culture and Islam as well as Modernist aesthetics, as a matter of color taxonomy at the Vatican and among traditional Zuni artists, in the business of dyeing textiles and its history, and in terms of technical issues such as the use of color to signal authenticity (stamps, paper money!), “unnatural” colors (fluorescence), or the role of color in new urban architecture.
Colour as Spiritual Significance in Contemporary Artistic and Architectural Creation
The present research paper aims to be a reflexion and an observation of the way colour is used in contemporary art and architecture as a means to recreate the artist's and architect's desired significance. For this, colour is firstly understood as a vital essence, a 'significant language' associated to life itself; comparing different theories, colour is then further defined as a fundamental essence of art itself: a vital component that 'ensouls' forms, and that allows for the adequate means to express the inner significance of the artwork. In order for colour to reach these depths in art, the artistic creation is also comprehended and defined as a sort of alchemy: a means by which mere materials become gold (bearers of a deep spiritual significance). A creation, thus, be it an architectural space or a painting, is a visual representation of the artist's inner life, but in it's significance lies these 'gold' essences: the profound emotional and spiritual significances, of which colour is indissociable. In this way, the phenomenon of colour, the research paper corroborates, is not something that can be applied post-creation but an essential tool of the creative process itself, a fundamental aspect of the alchemical process of creation. But how are these ideas applied in contemporary art and architecture? Bringing together multiple examples of contemporary art and architecture (briefly analysing architectural spaces, paintings, and new sculptural spatial art forms), the research paper aims to further reflect and consider the different ways in which colour is used in the artistic phenomena in order to amplify and accommodate the artwork's emotional and spiritual significances. The examples selected, aim to present a broad analysis of each type of significance and how it is achieved creating categories for each. In architecture three categories are defined as follows: the 'white' approach (such as the spaces of John Pawson), the 'colour-material-space' approach (such as Peter Zumthor's atmospheres) and the 'colour-significance' approach, defined mainly by the cornerstone example of Luis Barragan. In painting, a two folded approach is defined: the use of colour as 'colour-subject' (with examples ranging from the impressionists to Anselm Kiefer), and 'colour-colour' (defined by colour being used for it's own sake). Lastly, the sculptural spatial artworks, analyses colour uses as 'colour-object' (Richard Serra and Anish Kapoor) and 'colour-dimension' with James Turrell. Throughout the various examples, it is made clear that the colours used are in perfect sync with the spiritual and emotional significance the work aims to transmit. The research paper thus, further shows that colour is a fundamental essence that allows for the artistic vision, with all it's significance, to be created and materialised. Colour is not only a component of art, but one of the main aspects that most embodies it's significance.
T he eye that caresses the world The exhibition L'emozione dei COLORI nell'arte addresses the relationship between art and color. There is no history of art, and indeed of human creative expression via images in general, that can ignore color, both with regards to how it has been used by artists and to its physical, psychological, anthropological, and cultural perception by the viewer. One of the possible etymological derivations of the word "color, " namely the Latin color from calor meaning "heat, " also shows how impossible it is to speak of color without immediately connecting it with the world of emotion and passion. The link between the use of color and the feelings aroused by it was addressed in antiquity and later in medieval times. According to Georges Didi-Huberman (1990), the Middle Ages saw a rereading of ancient theories of the imago agens, i.e. the ability of pictorial images to make an impression on viewers, in which "the chosen means to make the image intense or even traumatic is nothing other than color and above all the color red. "