BLUE

I love colours, the times of a restless yearning, unsolvable, vital, a humble and sovereign explanation of the cosmic whys of my breathe

I do not need money

I have need of feelings

of words, words chosen wisely 

of flowers called thoughts, 

of roses called presences 

of dreams inhabiting the trees, 

of songs that make statues dance, 

of stars that murmur to the ear of lovers. 

I need poetry 

this spell which burns the weight of words 

that arouses emotions and gives new colors

I have lost my smile, but don’t worry. The dandelion has it

Blue has a calming effect on the psyche. 

Blue is the color of the sky and the sea and is often used to represent those images. 

Blue is a color that generally looks good in almost any shade and is a popular color among males. 

Blue is not a good color when used for food as there are few blue foods found in nature and it suppresses the appetite.

Trust is a fondation built one brick at a time

In ancient Rome, public servants wore blue. Today, police and other public servants wear blue.

In Iran, blue is the color of mourning. Blue was used as protection against witches, who supposedly dislike the color.

A beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light

The ancient Greeks classified colours by whether they were light or dark, rather than by their hue. The Greek word for dark blue, kyaneos, could also mean dark green, violet, black or brown. 

In the Islamic world, blue was of secondary importance to green, believed to be the favourite colour of the Prophet Mohammed.

He who follows the right path, 
thorns will not hurt him

“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? 

Thou art more lovely and more temperate: 

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, 

And summer's lease hath all too short a date: 

Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, 

And too often is his gold complexion dimm'd: 

And every fair from fair sometimes declines, 

By chance or natures changing course untrimm'd; 

By thy eternal summer shall not fade, 

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; 

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, 

When in eternal lines to time thou growest: 

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, 

So long lives this and this gives life to thee.” 

William Shakespeare, Sonnets

A puff of blue winter

In the art and life of Europe during the early Middle Ages, blue played a minor role. The nobility wore red or purple, while only the poor wore blue clothing, coloured with poor-quality dyes made from the woad plant. Blue played no part in the rich costumes of the clergy or the architecture or decoration of churches.

King Louis IX of France, better known as Saint Louis (1214–1270), became the first King of France to regularly dress in blue. This was copied by other nobles. Paintings of the mythical King Arthur began to show him dressed in blue. The coat of arms of the Kings of France became an azure or light blue shield, sprinkled with golden fleur-de-lis or lilies. Blue had come from obscurity to become the royal colour.

Equality is in regarding different things differently

Once blue became the colour of the King, it also became the colour of the wealthy and powerful in Europe. In the Middle Ages in France and to some extent in Italy, the dyeing of blue cloth was subject to license from the crown or state. In Italy, the dyeing of blue was assigned to a specific guild, the tintori di guado, and could not be done by anyone else without severe penalty. The wearing of blue implied some dignity and some wealth.

There are so many doors to open

In the Renaissance, a revolution occurred in painting; artists began to paint the world as it was actually seen, with perspective, depth, shadows, and light from a single source. Artists had to adapt their use of blue to the new rules. In medieval paintings, blue was used to attract the attention of the viewer to the Virgin Mary, and identify her.

In Renaissance paintings, artists tried to create harmonies between blue and red, lightening the blue with lead white paint and adding shadows and highlights. Raffaello was a master of this technique, balancing the reds and the blues so no one colour dominated the picture.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, chemists in Europe tried to discover a way to create synthetic blue pigments, avoiding the expense of importing and grinding lapis lazuli, azurite and other minerals. The Egyptians had created a synthetic colour, Egyptian blue, three thousand years BC, but the formula had been lost.

What people want, above all, is order

In 1709, a German druggist and pigment maker named Diesbach accidentally discovered a new blue while experimenting with potassium and iron sulphides. The new colour was first called Berlin blue, but later became known as Prussian blue.
Beginning in 1820s, Prussian blue was imported into Japan through the port of Nagasaki. It was called bero-ai, or Berlin Blue, and it became popular because it did not fade like traditional Japanese blue pigment, ai-gami, made from the dayflower. Prussian blue was used by Katsushika Hokusai in his famous wave paintings.

You'll never be just anything. A tsunami can never be just a wave. Waves are banal. Tsunamis reshape the Earth

The invention of new synthetic pigments in the 18th and 19th centuries considerably brightened and expanded the palette of painters. Joseph Mallord William Turner experimented with the new cobalt blue, and of the twenty colours most used by the Impressionists, twelve were new and synthetic colours, including cobalt blue, ultramarine and cerulean blue.

No matter how many snowstorms will pass through you, none will bring you the spring like love will.

The theory of complementary colours was developed by the French chemist Michel Eugene Chevreul in 1828. He demonstrated that placing complementary colours, such as blue and yellow-orange or ultramarine and yellow, next to each other heightened the intensity of each colour "to the apogee of their tonality."
In 1879 an American physicist, Ogden Rood, published a book charting the complementary colours of each colour in the spectrum. This principle of painting was used by Claude Monet in his Impression Sunrise, where he put a vivid blue next to a bright orange sun, and in Régate à Argenteuil, where he painted an orange sun against blue water.

"One can do something if one can see and understand it." Claude Monet

"Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule." Claude Monet

Blue was a favourite colour of the impressionist painters, who used it not just to depict nature but to create moods, feelings and atmospheres. Cobalt blue, a pigment of cobalt oxide-aluminium oxide, was a favourite of Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh.

Cobalt

It was similar to smalt, a pigment used for centuries to make blue glass, but it was much improved by the French chemist Louis Jacques Thénard, who introduced it in 1802. It was very stable but extremely expensive. Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, "'Cobalt is a divine colour and there is nothing so beautiful for putting atmosphere around things."

"Great things are done by a series of small things brought together." Vincent Van Gogh 

In 1901, a new synthetic blue dye, called Indanthrone blue, was invented, which had even greater resistance to fading during washing or in the sun. This dye gradually replaced artificial indigo, whose production ceased in about 1970. Today almost all blue clothing is dyed with an indanthrone blue.

The evil eye of La Celestine, Musée Picasso, Paris

At the beginning of the 20th century, many artists recognised the emotional power of blue, and made it the central element of paintings. During his Blue Period (1901–1904) Pablo Picasso used blue and green, with hardly any warm colours, to create a melancholy mood.

I'm just going to upload a selfie. Picasso

In Russia, the symbolist painter Pavel Kuznetsov and the Blue Rose art group (1906–1908) used blue to create a fantastic and exotic atmosphere.

A blue fountain, symbolizing life, a group of shadowy figures, in a predominantly blue space, reach towards one another in attitudes of yearning

In Germany, Wassily Kandinsky and other Russian émigrés formed the art group called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), and used blue to symbolise spirituality and eternity.

Large Blue Horses -Through radical compositions and bold experiments with color, Franz Marc strove to express the primary energy of the animal

Henri Matisse used intense blues to express the emotions he wanted viewers to feel.

The conversation. "A certain blue penetrates your soul" Henri Matisse

In the art of the second half of the 20th century, painters of the abstract expressionist movement began to use blue and other colours in pure form, without any attempt to represent anything, to inspire ideas and emotions.

"Colour is only an instrument. My interest is in expressing human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on" Mark Rothko

In the 20th century, it also became possible to own your own colour of blue. The French artist Yves Klein, with the help of a Parisian paint dealer, Edouard Adam, created a specific blue, which he patented. It was made of ultramarine pigment combined with a synthetic resin called Rhodopas, which gave it a particularly brilliant colour. This colour, reminiscent of the lapis lazuli used to paint the Madonna's robes in medieval paintings, was to become famous as International Klein Blue (IKB).

Yves Klein, Monochrome works, The Blue Epoch. IKB 191

Blue is the the color that corresponds to the 5th chakra. The musical note of blue is G, a favorite key for the composer of romantic music.

Marc Chagall, Le paysage bleu, 1949. Wuppertal - Von der Heydt-Museum

Marc Chagall, Blue Lovers

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. 

It is the colour of love.

Marc Chagall

Dwell on the beauty of life.
Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them

Several languages, including Japanese, Thai, Korean, and Lakota Sioux, use the same word to describe blue and green. For example, in Vietnamese the colour of both tree leaves and the sky is xanh. In Japanese, the word for blue (青 ao) is often used for colours that English speakers would refer to as green, such as the colour of a traffic signal meaning "go".

Life starts from a white hole and ends in a black hole.
But in the middle... 

Silence was pleased

There are things known and there are things unknown and in between are The Doors.

Jim Morrison

Faith goes up the stairs that love has built and looks out the windows which hope has opened

Cancun, Underwater museum, Mexico

A new way of creating blue is chemiluminescence, the emission of light (luminescence), as the result of a chemical reaction.

CSI use 3-Aminophthalhydrazide (Luminol) to detect blood even after it has been cleaned up.

Scientists create glow-in-the-dark using jellyfish DNA

He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

I Love Chicago best in the cold

The Ocean

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin; his control

Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain

The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain

A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,

When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,

Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

His steps are not upon thy paths; thy fields

Are not a spoil for him; thou dost arise

And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields

For earth’s destruction thou dost all despise,

Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,

And send’st him, shivering in thy playful spray,

And howling, to his gods, where haply lies

His petty hope in some near port or bay,

And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay.

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls

Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,

And monarchs tremble in their capitals,

The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make

Their clay creator the vain title take

Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war,

These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,

They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar

Alike the Armada’s pride or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee:

Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?

Thy waters washed them power while they were free,

And many a tyrant since; their shores obey

The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay

Has dried up realms to deserts: not so thou,

Unchangeable save to thy wild waves’ play;

Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow;

Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form

Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,

Calm or convulsed; in breeze or gale or storm,

Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime

Dark-heaving, boundless, endless, and sublime,

The image of Eternity, the throne

Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime

The monsters of the deep are made; each zone

Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy

I wantoned with thy breakers; they to me

Were a delight; and if the freshening sea

Made them a terror, ’t was a pleasing fear,

For I was as it were a child of thee,

And trusted to thy billows far and near,

And laid my hand upon thy mane, as I do here.

From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Lord George Gordon Byron (1788–1824)

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean

You are not a drop in the ocean. 
You are the entire ocean in a drop.

Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī

It is the calm and silent water that drowns a man

Blue is associated in Christianity generally and Catholicism in particular, with the Virgin Mary.

In Hinduism many of the gods are depicted as having blue-coloured skin, particularly those associated with Vishnu, who is said to be the Preserver of the world and thus intimately connected to water. Krishna and Ram, Vishnu's avatars, are usually blue. Shiva, the Destroyer, is also depicted in light blue tones and is called neela kantha, or blue-throated, for having swallowed poison in an attempt to turn the tide of a battle between the gods and demons in the gods' favour.

In Judaism, in the Torah, the Israelites were commanded to put fringes, tzitzit, on the corners of their garments, and to weave within these fringes a "twisted thread of blue (tekhelet)"

The world is my church, my actions are my prayer, my behavior is my creed

Faith goes up the stairs that love has built and looks out the windows which hope has opened

With every end there is a new beginning