Redtree Times

Vigil In Blue, 2023

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

—Fragmentary Blue, Robert Frost

Ah, the color blue. Though my work is often associated with the color red or the red and orange-tinged tones of the Indian Yellow that marks much of my inky wet work, it is blue that has me in its hold. Maybe that comes from its ability to do and say so many things. It can carry a multitude of deep feelings and emotions in its many shades and variations.

While it often can be used to depict the most mundane of scenes, the soft blue spring sky in a landscape, it can often carry with it a mystic, spiritual quality. A deeper meaning that is hidden within the tone and hue of the color.

As the artist Wassily Kandinsky wrote about blue:

The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural. The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.

That … awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural… might well be the quality of it that stokes my affinity for the color. I think that is the case with the new smallish piece done for my June show at the Principle Gallery that is shown above, Vigil in Blue. While it has the trademark elements of the Red Tree and the golden tones of Indian Yellow in the fields, the color blue carries the emotional weight here.

You can point to the other colors or the depth that the fields and distant hills bring you into the picture or the presence of watching crow as being the dominant feature in this piece and you wouldn’t be wrong from your perspective. But from my point of view, it is that blue that says it all, that is the object of the painting’s sentence.

But that’s just one guy’s opinion. As I said, you are free to see it in your own way.

Art is always open to interpretation. And therein lies its strength and beauty.

Here’s a song from Joni Mitchell that deals with the color blue in its bluest form. This is Blue from her 1971 album of the same title.