Have been analyzing the use of blue in the history of art...
Often when you feel blue it can indicate sadness about something, but in the history of art, it was used in Christian symbolic iconography to represent the divine. Lapis Lazuli was and still is, a very expensive stone and its pigment was used in Early Christian Art through history sparingly. It was used for example commonly in frescoes (paintings on wet stucco) for the cloak of Jesus or the Virgin Mary to achieve a brilliant blue. The Sistine Chapel frescoes by Michelangelo show his brilliant use of this pigment.
German Romanticism also used blue to representing the transcendent.
What does that mean: Transcendent refers to some thing or someone who is beyond and outside the ordinary range of human ... We are in God and God is in us and are things.
In the early19th century there was a regular mania for blue, as it were, which peaked in 1826 in the tourist discovery of the Blue Grotto on Capri. As a child I visited the Blue John mines in Derbyshire's Peak District, (its amazing how reading something triggers the mind). This is another example of an area in the UK that became economically prosperous in the Victorian era for this blue fluorite rock that was used in the mania for all sorts of ornaments in blue. There is also Blue Wedgewood and "faux blue" pottery of the same period.
Picasso's Blue Period has nothing to do with my painting, because firstly I don't like his subject matter much at all. He painted bull fighting which I despise, he was deeply affected by the anarchy in Spain and the Spanish Civil War, and predominantly painted troubled people. He's nothing like me. But I do I admire his brilliant line and use of color and emotion.
Therefore I like to think my work is trying to portray animals as Divine beings. I also like pastoral scenes, especially 17th Dutch Lanscape Painting. Blue is a calming color and I like calm.
NB: Am working on a commission so there is no posting at present as it is a gift. Sorry.
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