Collection: OUT OF THE BLUES : Exhibition

Singing the Blues.

A colour.  An emotion.

The colour of devotion.

In a world buzzing with colour we associate blue with calm, peace, cleanliness, divinity, reliability, sadness…

As the colour most rarely found in nature so blue is the newest hue in our history. It is the colour missing from the earliest cave paintings of our prehistoric ancestors - though they would have seen it in the sky above and by those who lived by the sea, mercurial as both of those would be.

To be used in art, pottery, architecture and cloth the colour blue would need to be discovered - by involved heating, grinding and glueing of elements as by the Egyptians;  by growing, soaking and wringing it out of plants such as Woad and Indigo;  by mining, crushing and sifting of minerals such as Cobalt and Lapis lazuli from remote and dangerous mountain ranges;  or by happy accidental chemical reactions by alchemists, pigment makers and graduate students alike in the last 300 years.

The history of blue runs like a thin and yet ever brightening, strengthening line through the story of Silk Roads, Trade Winds, fortunes made and ruined, artists like Turner, Titian and Picasso championing their own favourite versions.  A history over 4,000 years in the making.  With each successive discovery of a yet more vibrant, stable colour being made -  Prussian Blue (c.1705), French Ultramarine (1828), Yves Klein Blue (1960), YInMn (2009) - who knows how more blue a blue can become.  Have we reached peak blue on our optic scale?

Conceived in the Delft Ware rooms of the Rijksmuseum last Summer, Out of the Blues is an homage to this one colour in its purest forms.

True Blue Baby I Love You.