Blue Distance: Amanda McCavour (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.”
The Interweaving of Color and Theme: Purple and Blue in the Works of
Pennsylvania Literary Journal, 2019
In her essay "Walter Sickert", Virginia Woolf states that "great artists are great colourists" (241). On her skill as a colorist, Jack F. Stewart notes how she uses in The Waves "unmixed colors as a painter might squeeze them from a tube straight onto the canvas" (91). D. H. Lawrence who occasionally painted asserted his own passion for the pictorial art in his essay "Making Pictures" (302). For Anais Nin, the literary Lawrence "worked like a painter" (63). Both Woolf and Lawrence are evidently painterly writers and masters in their use of color words. Many critics have studied the visual quality of their writing, but my essay aims to show their similar interweaving of color and theme. I will examine the interweaving of purple and blue with death and sex in Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves and her short story "Blue and Green" and D.H. Lawrence's short story "The Woman Who Rode Away" and his poems "Violets", "Purple Anemones", and "Bavarian Gentians".
A paper detailing the meaning and significance of art and its varying forms on the world and its inhabitants.
2023
Color perception is a complex process that involves both physiological and psychological factors, it is both objective and subjective. Physiologically, color is perceived through the interaction of light with our visual system, our physical bodies and organs. Light enters the eye and stimulates the retina cones, which are responsible for detecting color and are sensitive to different wavelengths of light, corresponding to different colors in the visible spectrum. However, the experience of color goes beyond mere physical stimulation. And it is this „going beyond” which is the topic of this seminar work. Phenomenology, as the philosophical movement, method and approach that focuses on the direct experience and consciousness of phenomena, emphasizes this idea that our experience of color is subjective and personal. Through an phenomenological approach, we can recognize and analyze color, not just as an objective property of the physical world, but as a dynamic and multifaceted aspect of our human experience. When it comes to subjectivity; it is true that, for example, different cultures may have different associations and meanings attached to specific colors, or that an individual can have a form of visual deviation like daltonism; but in this work subjective should be understood as the concrete and embodied wordly existence of a individual who is subject of the experience of color. This does not mean that I will talk about color as an isolated phenomenon, but instead as being embedded in the context of our perception of the world. Color is a fundamental element of visual art, and its usage can greatly impact our aesthetic experience and emotional response to artworks. It is temporal, it can evoke emotions, moods, and associations, and it is fundamental to the visual „canvas” we have access to in our visual perception. Artists themselves need to carefully select and arrange colors if they want to convey a specific meaning, evoke an emotion, and if they want to communicate their artistic intentions. Colors themselves are given to us through shapes, lines, textures, and composition, all which allow for our visual perception of beings. The way colors are juxtaposed and their relationships to one another can create various experiences such as contrast, harmony, balance, or tension, which shape the overall aesthetic experience of an artwork. It is also the case that artists can employ color as a mean to emphasizing certain elements, creating visual hierarchy, or establishing a focal point within their compositions. The use of color to single out specific elements or draw attention is not limited to the artistic world alone. Just as an artist employs techniques to direct the viewer's focus inside his artwork, in nature, colors play a vital role in various biological processes, including communication, mate selection, toxicity and camouflage. In these processes the colors need to either blend in or stand out from the surrounding environment, serving as either visual signals that capture the attention of potential mates or as a way to hide oneself from the view of your prey or predators. This connection between color in art and biology highlights the inherent relationship between human perception and the natural world. Our sensitivity to color and our ability to distinguish and interpret different hues has likely evolved as an adaptation to understand and navigate the environment around us. By acknowledging the connection between the phenomenology of color in art and its biological underpinnings, we gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which color engages and influences us as viewers. The utilization of color in art, with its roots in our biological predispositions and ecological interactions, can evoke profound emotional responses, stimulate our visual senses, and create meaningful aesthetic experiences, but also to understand the experiences of others and our place in the world around us.