Pigment

Historically, pigments were made from rocks and minerals ground into a fine powder.

These pigments are not water soluble, and need a liquid ‘carrier‘ of oil, wax, or egg yolk for the pigment to bind and adhere to a surface.
Water soluble fabric dyes were made from organic matter. Blue for example could be made from the crushed leaves of the woad plant.

The reds, browns, yellows, blacks and whites to be found in cave paintings date back 30,000 years. These ‘earth’ colours came from clay ochre, naturally occurring iron oxides, burnt wood, and bones.

Blue pigment came much later, 24,000 years later.

In around 4000 BC, Egyptian miners discovered Lapis Lazuli.

This semi-precious gemstone has been highly prized for its opaque depth of colour, its intensity and its rarity ever since. Pharaohs’ tombs were decorated with it, and Cleopatra’s eyes were made from it during her mummification.

Due to its rarity, Lapis was prohibitively expensive and reserved for the most powerful.

But in around 2500 BC, Egyptian ‘scientists’ discovered by heating sand, lime and copper to a temperature of 800 degrees centigrade, Calcium-Copper Tetrasilicate could be produced. The resulting pigment is what we now call ‘Egyptian Blue’.

It is thought to be the first synthetically produced pigment, and was used extensively for the next 3000 years around the Mediterranean.
Today most pigments are chemically manufactured and of the three primary colours, red, yellow and blue, red is the warmest and blue the coolest.

Symbolism and Use

Diverse cultures associate the colour blue with diverse ideas.

In addition, even within the same culture, a colour’s associative meaning is fluid.

Within a religious context for example, blue has a spiritual symbolism.

It will have an entirely different association when providing directions on British motorway signage, and another when advertising the logo of social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

It will have a different association again when used for the NHS logo and the uniforms of its doctors and nurses. The helmets of the United Nations peacekeeping forces are light blue, and British slang for the police is the boys in blue.

Colour therapy indicates that red raises blood pressure and blue lowers it.

Colour symbolism is therefore culturally specific, changes over time, and is dependent on context and usage.

Nonetheless, specific colours can have long-lasting symbolism within the context of religious iconographies.

Blue for example, the colour of the sky is associated in Christian iconography with heaven. It represents mystery, transcendence and the divine. Royalty in ancient times were often clothed in purple and blue. The fabric dyes for ‘Royal’ blue were rare, providing a depth of colour and fastness.

As the ‘Queen of Heaven and Earth’, the outer robes of the Virgin Mary are blue, signifying her divinity.

The upper sections and dome of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul (‘The Blue Mosque’) are adorned with 23,000 blue tiles from the city of
Iznik, decorated with cypress trees, tulips, roses and fruits. Illuminated by the light from 200 arched windows, it is a vision of a bountiful paradise – a blue paradise.

In Hinduism, one of the three main deities, Vishnu ‘The Preserver’, spends eternity sleeping. But in a crisis he awakens to save humanity, as might a superhero. In one belief, Vishnu drank a pot of poison to save creation. It stained him permanently with a blue neck, and his manifestation, Krishna, is portrayed with blue skin. In this context blue represents the fortitude to defeat evil and is associated with protection.

Depending on the context, blue can signify truth, peace, virtue, transcendence, protection and authority.
It is the stuff of sea and sky- its qualities lie offshore and above terra firma.

Some Applications of Blue in Visual Art

James Abbot McNeill Whistler. (1834-1903).
‘Nocturne in Blue and Silver – Chelsea’. 1871
Oil on wood, 50.2 x 60.8cm.

tate.org.uk/art/artworks/whistler-nocturne-blue-and-silver-chelsea-t01571

Whistler was a forerunner of the term ‘art for art’s sake’.

He disliked the moralising tone of much Victorian art with its preference for moral education and its illustration of passages from the Bible and Greek mythology. He disliked the emphasis on storytelling.

He also thought that art should concern itself less with the objective observation of nature and more with quote, ‘’an artistic arrangement’’.

Whistler believed art should aspire to the condition of music and concern itself with tonal harmony, composition, colour and design. It should be a visual experience in the purest sense, not a literary adjunct.

His ambition was to liberate art from narrative and the faithful depiction of nature.

‘Nocturne in Blue and Silver’, 1871, is a view from Battersea looking across the Thames towards Chelsea. The view is observed at dusk.

It is painted with oil on wooden board in thin washes. A number of Whistler’s ‘Nocturnes’ were painted with such thin layered washes that the board had to remain horizontal so the paint wouldn’t run off. But this technique achieved luminescence.

In painting the scene as the light fades, topographical details disappear and colour naturally becomes muted towards pale blue through to dark blue. As a result, the painting is radically minimal in terms of its recorded detail and its palette. The attention to representational detail is breathtakingly absent.

According to anecdote, Whistler would stand with a friend and stare across the Thames as dusk fell. Whistler would then turn around with his back to the scene and describe it from memory. His friend, still looking at the scene, would point out any discrepancies in Whistler’s memory if there were any. And if there were, they would return the next evening and repeat the process until he got the view fixed in his mind’s eye.

‘Nocturne in Blue and Silver – Chelsea’ is entirely blue except for a few small dabs of gaslight, presumably the reference to silver in the title. The riverside buildings on the opposite bank are indistinguishable from one another and reduced to a silhouette of darkest blue. Three quarters of the painting comprises water and sky. The 17 dabs of light on the other bank tell us we are looking at buildings as the sun sets and the lights are lit. The identity of a barge in the foreshore is achieved with a few undisguised brush strokes.

The monochromatic blueness of the painting, and the built environment being reduced to a silhouette, has the effect of making land, water and sky become one whole. The lights from buildings flickering on the Thames enhance this unity of earth, air and water.

It is worth noting that the place name of Chelsea is only tacked on at the end of main title of the painting. Chelsea is sidelined and not the primary subject of the painting.

This painting isn’t describing a place, but reinventing it from memory.

In doing so, these reductions turn our attention to the object quality of the painting’s surface – the colour, the painted marks, and the artist’s deft use of hand and brush. Brush strokes are brought to the fore. By sidelining overt subject matter and slavish detail, he concentrates our looking at the distribution of parts in a design across a flat plane and the application of paint upon it.

His butterfly ‘signature’ at the centre bottom of the painting (an influence from the ideographs of Japanese prints) disrupts the illusionism of the scene and reminds us of the 2-dimensional plane of the painting.

His ‘Nocturnes’ are clearly a precursor of abstract painting and push towards the dissolution of subject matter external to painting itself.

Jason Martin. b.1970
‘Untitled’ (Royal blue light/ Zurich blue/ Titanium white). 2018
Oil on Aluminium, 202x182cm.

artsy.net/artwork/jason-martin-untitled-royal-blue-light-slash-zurich-blue-slash-titanium-white

Jason Martin has taken Whistler’s innovations to their extreme.

In terms of ‘art for art’s sake’, Martin’s paintings are as assertive in their aesthetic ‘purity’ as it is possible to be.
His paintings are not pictures of something else.

By definition, they are not the expression of an artist’s symbolic language in telling a story or crafting a metaphor. However, he has said, ‘’the most interesting abstraction has a source of figuration, and my approach is that there’s a warmth which I try to affect into the movements and gestures’’.

His works do become an image when reproduced in art magazines or on websites, but at that point, they are symbolic of the art world’s publicity machine.

The word ‘Untitled’ when naming his painting asserts that it doesn’t have a title like a book or a film, because there is no story being told. It is not a metaphor and there is no narrative or allegory.

Picture making is a visual language, not a written language, hence the desirability of prompts in titling figurative art.

Martin has not made a picture alluding to something else external to the act of painting.

‘Untitled’ (Royal blue light, Zurich blue, Titanium white) 2018, simply provides the names of the three colours used, the dimensions, and the date of the work (which is the very least a commercial gallery will need for its stock list).

If the painting’s ‘about’ anything, it’s about paint and its manipulation on a flat surface and its ‘artistic arrangement’.

The composition of ‘Untitled’ (Royal blue light, Zurich blue, Titanium white) 2018 is straight forward and minimal – three horizontal bands of equal width in three different blues. Martin uses wide ‘toothed combs’ of steel which drag, push and scour thick volumes of paint in dynamic movements across the surface of sheet aluminium. The paint is so thick that when it’s dragged and pushed from one side to the other it leaves striations. Some of these scored furrows are fine and some are deep. And where the three bands meet, there are overlaps forming a ridge.

By using a simple composition of three blue bands, the surface relief, texture and the application of paint are given emphasis.

This technique uses to maximum effect what happens under gallery lighting which is always from above. Many oil painters find this lighting problematic because of the reflective nature of oil paint and the resulting mirroring of light off oil painted surfaces.

Martin’s technique literally highlights the gestural bands of colour through shadow and light.

When exhibited, the painted surface of ‘Untitled’ (Royal blue light, Zurich blue/ Titanium white) 2018, becomes a subtle sculptural relief made up of hundreds of horizontal wavy shadows created by overhead lighting. The visual effects of the work are created as much by modulated shadow as by paint. The canvas is big at over two metres high, indicating that the artist’s movements are from the shoulder, not the fingertips.

The moment of creation is physically tangible in front of our eyes in the viscous sensuality of paint and in its shadows and light. It is a physical trace, performed in two dimensions and frozen in time when dry.

The idea of painting a scene has been replaced with a spectacle in paint – the residue of gestural movements.

If it is possible to have ‘hot’ blues, this painting has them.

The artist has a home and studio in Portugal and it is hard not to feel the warmth of the Mediterranean in this particular painting with its suggestion of seascape and horizon.

Pablo Picasso. 1881-1973. ‘Self Portrait’ 1901. Oil on canvas, 81x60cm.
www.wsimag.com/muse-picasso/artworks/84848

Picasso deploys a range of cold blues from 1901 to 1904. Most canvases from these times belong to Picasso’s ubiquitously known ‘Blue Period’. They use a palette of blue, grey blue and sickly greens.

The period coincides with a bout of melancholia lasting three years.

The causes of his melancholia are thought to have been a number of psychologically damaging events.

His sister had died from diphtheria in 1896 aged seven, and in 1899 a painter friend in Barcelona, Hortensi Guell, had thrown himself off a cliff.

Picasso first visited Paris in 1900. He went with his close friend, the Spanish poet Carles Casagemus. Months later Casagemus committed suicide while attending a dinner party and shooting himself. He had recently been spurned by his lover.

Years later when being interviewed for a book, Picasso is quoted to have said, ‘’It was thinking about Casagemus that got me started painting in blue’’.

By 1901 Picasso’s paintings weren’t selling well. To add to his darkening mood, monochromatic blue canvases did not sell at all. Collectors did not want them and the melancholia deepened as poverty and deprivation took hold.

Picasso’s Blue Period is noted for the abject subjects portrayed on canvas; people at the margins of society – drunks, prostitutes, homeless beggars, cripples, blind women, the hungry, sick and destitute. He was permitted to visit Saint Lazare women’s prison a number of times to sketch the inmates.

Picasso was angered by the maltreatment of the working classes during the industrial revolution (he later joined the Communist Party).

With his financial hardship increasing, his empathy with the abject subjects of his paintings grew stronger. He saw himself in opposition to mainstream society and an outsider as an artist rejected by collectors. He was unable to sell what he believed important enough to put down on canvas.

Picasso has been quoted as saying ‘’Painting is not made to decorate apartments’’.

It could be argued that his inability or unwillingness to stop painting subjects that nobody wanted was also the reason for his deepening melancholia.

His dogged persistence proved him right in the end, but at twenty years of age, fame and wealth could only have been a dream. In 2015 at Sotheby’s New York, ‘Nightclub Singer’1901, produced the same year as his self-portrait, sold for 67.5 million US dollars.

The self-portrait of 1901 shows something of his frame of mind at the time.

The essence of a successful portrait is to go beyond surface appearance and provide a glimpse of the subject’s soul, their psychology, their inner life under the skin.
Picasso achieves this in his self-portrait of 1901.

This painting uses the same blue palette as the other paintings from the period. Picasso is isolated in front of a cold blue/green background. There is no interior background – the artist’s studio for instance, that one might expect. And he is not standing in a natural outdoor setting either. This person is located without a context. He’s standing within a kind of abstract cold blue void. This formal construct could be expressing his self-image as someone outside the mainstream of society and without a place in it. Another construct is the apparel. He’s wearing a thick cape buttoned up tight with the collar turned up. This emphasizes that whatever context he is within, it’s cold. The drawn cheeks and eyes have a sickly bluish parlour under them. He was only twenty when he painted this self-portrait but he looks much, much older. It’s not only that thick dark cape that’s heavy. That cape helps to illustrate the interior life of the subject using it as an exterior ‘prop’.

Many self-portraits by artists would have them portrayed standing with their brushes and palette in hand. Wearing a buttoned-up cape and holding palette and brushes would look silly. It would suggest nonchalance, not freezing damp.

But unlike the other subjects from the Blue Period and the significant difference, is that he doesn’t look like a victim. The cape has a volume and surface area within the whole canvas which implies something big and solid, not elongated and emaciated. Unlike many of his other subjects, he is not looking down or away from the viewer. He is looking straight back at us with those piercing black eyes. This person is not downcast, he is down on his luck, but resolute.

Picasso chooses to be an artist in 1901, he chooses his destiny. The social outcasts and destitute of his other Blue Period paintings didn’t choose their fate.

In elongating the physiques of the figures of most of his Blue Period works, they recall El Greco’s paintings of Apostles and Saints. Picasso will have been well aware of them. In doing so, he casts the downtrodden as having nobility.