As is clear, all the work I have been creating for this project is very BLUE. From cyanotype to underwater clips/photography, I seem to be drawn to the range of blues created by each of these processes individually. It seems to be a calm yet intriguing aesthetic to continue exploring. I wanted to research further into the significance of the colour blue. Is this my blue period?
Researching blue
Yves Klein
IKB (International Klein Blue)
The letters IKB stand for International Klein Blue, a distinctive ultramarine which Klein registered as a trademark colour in 1957. He considered that this colour had a quality close to pure space and he associated it with immaterial values beyond what can be seen or touched.
(Translation of above image)
"I.K.B
ESSENTIAL POTENTIAL SPATIAL IMMEASURABLE FAST STATIC DYNAMIC ABSOLUTE PNEUMATIC PURE PRESTIGIOUS MARVELOUS EXASPERATING UNSETTLED EXACT SENSITIVE PERMEATED PERMEATING IMMATERIAL"
Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colors are not. They are psychological spaces; red, for example, presupposing a hearth releasing heat. All colors bring forth specific associative ideas, tangible or psychological, while blue suggests, at most, the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual nature what is most abstract.
On the opening day, Yves delivers in the space made available to him a sentence in the words of Bachelard : “First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth”,
Most associated with his blue works and his trademarked colour, Yves Klein 'used blue as the vehicle for his quest to capture immateriality and the infinite". His work strived to "express feeling rather than figurative form" and his IKB seemed the way to do this.
Picasso
Blue period
Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour - Carol Mavor
The sea, the sky, the veins of your hands, the earth itself when photographed from space... blue sometimes seems to overwhelm all the other shades of our world in its all-encompassing presence. The blues of Blue Mythologies include those present in the world's religions, a robin's eggs, science, slavery, gender, sex, art, the literary past and contemporary film.
'Blue Mythologies is a visual, literary and cultural study of the colour blue'
This book was a fascinating read into the background of the colour blue and its significance within our lives. She talks of associations we hold with the colour and discusses artworks and literary pieces exploring these concepts. Cyanotypes reoccur throughout her writing and in image form also, with interesting references such as
"Death in Venice is like a cyanotype".
Cyanotype printing in Blue Mythologies - Anna Atkin's botanical cyanotypes below
To write with light in the key of blue: Helen Chadwick's Oval Court
Helen Chadwick created these works using a photocopier full of blue ink, placing her body and various other objects on the glass to reproduce these images of herself, and then stitch them together to create Oval Court, a huge floor-mounted work.
In Chadwick's Oval Court, the distance between the one who photographs and the photograph itself is dissolved by the process of the photocopy machine which yields, but does not take, as if it were performing the intransitive form of the verb, to photograph.
To write, to photograph, to blue
Chadwick indulges in the paradoxes of blue, not only the 'sea and air', but also its innocence and obscenity, death and life, and so on.
Her body, along with her harvest of animals and trimmings, floats (like light) in a pool of blue.
To blue is to write with the light of the cyanotype, and in the case of Chadwick, the photo-copy machine
Comparing cyanotype and this process is interesting, both relatively direct modes of representing something.
Chadwick's body on the glass, quickly lit by the efficient mechanical squeegee of blinding light pulled beneath the glass by the photocopy machine, gives way to an emphasis on touch, which is akin to Atkin's botany work. Chadwick's breast had to touch the top of the glass, just as Atkin's algae has to touch the paper. Furthermore, each has an enchanting sense of the unexplained (even if we do know the science behind the cyanotype and the photocopy). Touching white magic in a blue pool. Chadwick's blue photocopies and Atkins' cyanotypes both share immediacy.
I want my prints/scans/cyanotypes/risograph prints and photography to also hold this feeling of immediacy and touch.
I am concerned with the intransitive immediacy of the photocopied image and its unmechanical predecessor, the cyanotype.
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