You cannot get a grip on blue.
Blue is the sky, the sea, a god’s eye, a devil’s tail, a birth, a strangulation, a virgin’s cloak, a monkey’s ass. It’s a butterfly, a bird, a spicy joke, the saddest song, the brightest day.
Blue is sly, slick, it slides into the room sideways, a slippery trickster.
This is a story about the color blue, and like blue, there’s nothing true about it. Blue is beauty, not truth. ‘True blue’ is a ruse, a rhyme; it’s there, then it’s not. Blue is a deeply sneaky color.
― Christopher Moore, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art
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He’s right, blue is a deeply tricky color.
Even looking now at the new painting above on this screen, an 8″ by 8″ panel that I call In a Blue Place, I can’t be sure that it is the same blue that I see when I look at the actual painting. And that change of hue can alter the reality of the painting, the feeling that comes from it.
Each person sees blue in a different way, some absorbing the overall tone of it while others latch on to the subtler tones within it. If I say blue the blue that might spring to your mind may be so much different than the one I am trying to describe that they might be entirely different colors.
As Moore says: How do you know, when you think blue — when you say blue — that you are talking about the same blue as anyone else?
It can mean and be so many different things. And maybe this multiplicity is the basis in the lure of blue for me.
Blue is also tricky to properly capture in an image. A painting like this particular piece is a nightmare to edit for me with all of its varying blues and tones and darknesses. I know that the image that you’re looking at is not the same one that I am looking at beside me at this moment.
The one on the screen took me about an hour of editing to get to the point where on the screen it is only a mile away from the original. I like it on the screen now but it is still a pale facsimile to the real thing. There are whole hues of blue that aren’t showing in this image above and I’m not sure if I will ever be able to proplerly capture them.
I like that elusiveness, that slippery quality that comes with blue. Yes, it is a color filled with meaning and emotion but it doesn’t want to be contained. And that is the thrill of working with it.
And that I will continue to do.
The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness. 
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. 
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
Never doubt that a small number of dedicated people can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.
Introspection, or ‘sitting in the silence,’ is an unscientific way of trying to force apart the mind and senses, tied together by the life force. The contemplative mind, attempting its return to divinity, is constantly dragged back toward the senses by the life currents.
Redtree Times 