Ode to the Blues

Today I am painting a cabinet a deep, glossy blue.

As a child, I found the color depressing, even oppressive. My mother used to dress me in outfits of blue, sometimes matching those of my older brother. It was the color of uniforms, conformity, order, respectability: My parents’ car was navy blue; the Queen wore a royal blue sash. Once I was old enough to dress myself and make my own clothes, I chose the colors of autumn, greens, browns, deep orange and burgundy. They grounded me in a world I could live in.

I blame my blue eyes for the change. It began in my 40s. I discovered that on sunny days by wearing a certain shade of lavender blue, my eyes shone brighter. I enjoyed the compliments my eyes attracted, and gradually I adopted a different palate. Grey crept into my hair, and gradually blue-greys seemed to better suit my aging face. But in general, I still avoided living in blue: I found the color coldly forbidding.

Did grief complete the switch to choosing blue? Now I find the coolness of the color calming. I painted my bedroom a subtle blue. I can immerse myself into its many layers and shades and settle. It is a color that makes me travel inward and slow down, contemplative.

Theory of color says blue is intellectual, but I think it has more of a spiritual dimension. Is that because in religious paintings, the Virgin Mary is dressed in the deepest and most radiant of blues, and I have culturally absorbed that message? The Bible does not say the Virgin wore blue, rather it was for a practical reason the painters chose the color. In the Middle Ages ultra marine pigment was hard to obtain and expensive. It was made by grinding up the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, hence it symbolized high value and was considered worthy of royalty.

But those painters must have understood its power. Today, Yves Klein paints his canvasses exclusively in blue. He believes that blue, like the sky, represents the infinite, the immaterial, it opens a door to freedom. For him, the color blue is the invisible made visible.

I visited once a chapel in the Rhine Valley where all the stained-glass windows are made in shades of blue, creating rivers of beauty that flood across it stone floors and walls. The Jewish painter Marc Chagall designed the windows after World War II as a symbol of peace and reconciliation between Germany and its murdered. I sat there bathed in the color blue, crying.

What other color contains such multitudes? To sing the blues, to have the blues, to feel blue. It is a color of many depths and dimensions. Maggie Nelson wrote a whole book, Bluets, contemplating its shades, but ultimately she wrote a book about grief for a lost love, just like Bob Dylan when he sang Tangled up in Blue.

So perhaps blue is the color that leads one deeper, through the difficult toward acceptance, forgiveness and compassion.

Along the way, it opens new ways of seeing. Think of those immortal days of summer, a bluebird-blue sky and plunging into an ocean of liquid blue. What other color allows you such rich escape? Or climb to the top of a mountain to find the infinite sky stretched endlessly blue above you. Or try walking onto a glacier and peering into the frozen ice, there you look backward in time into hundreds of years of frozen water refracted back to you in this one ethereal color, the purest, most iridescent of blues.

Looking into Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska

I am painting a cabinet deep blue. I hadn’t expected to choose this color but woke up one morning and knew that it must be dark blue. It requires sanding and priming and multiple layers of paint; it requires my time and patience and willingness to work through the tough parts.

On my first attempt, the paint peeled off. I had not prepared the surface. I had not appreciated what lay beneath. I am trying again now to capture the extraordinary depth of blue, the richness and the infinite that now I know is the reward of immersing myself in blue.