Yves Klein Blue is a vibrant ultramarine hue, trademarked as International Klein Blue (IKB) by the French artist Yves Klein in 1960. Klein was fascinated by the colour's immateriality and intensity, using it in his monochromatic works to evoke the innite and the void. He saw blue as a symbol of the sky and sea, transcending physical boundaries. By applying IKB to sculptures, canvases, and performance art, Klein aimed to create an immersive experience. This particular shade became iconic for its depth, often described as a gateway to the spiritual and the immaterial.

*Yves Klein Blue*
*Image Credit: Wikiart.org*

In the most ordinary sense, the word abstract implies something that is separated from the reality to which it supposedly belongs. Therefore ‘abstraction’ is a process that involves considering and taking some characteristics of this ‘supposed reality’ to envisage them partially and differently. If the whole of something is concrete, then isolating a part of that whole and considering the abstraction of it can only be performed through thought. However, because the process of abstraction and abstract art is abstract in itself, it is affected by the second indication of its unreality. If the only true whole is completely ‘real’ and ‘concrete’, then there is only one whole: the visible world. To express abstraction is to express the invisible, the spiritual and the inner harmonies of life. This search for the ‘invisible’ can be, at least for a moment, satisfied emotionally with abstracting colour.

“The inclination of blue to depth is so strong that its inner appeal is stronger when its shade is deeper.” ... “When it sinks to almost black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human.” 1

I thought a lot about the colour blue, as most people (especially poets) oen do. I stood in front of Barnett Newmann’s painting Onement VI. I tried for some time to weave through my new surroundings, trying to find dignity or romance in being alone. I stood in the Stedelijk museum and searched in that painting for answers and it responded with what felt like a never-ending depth. One that I would later familiarise myself with in literature about blue from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. “To have seen such beautiful things.” ... “But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it?” 2

Thought-forms, a book by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, emerged from Theosophy and Late-Victorian mysticism with roots that stem back to Goethe’s theory of colour, trickling into Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. The central argument in this religious work is that emotions, sounds, ideas and events manifest as visual auras which have colour. In an attempt to persuade the reader of the power of thoughts, the book opens, “...to paint in earth’s dull colours the forms clothed in the living light of other worlds is a hard and thankless task; so much the more gratitude is due to those who have attempted it. They needed coloured fire, and had only ground earths.” 3 Their attempt was to visualise the invisible and honour those who tried. These occult ideas had a huge influence on early abstract artists, and the recognition of emotion combined colour and perception in the art to come. I, however, wish to argue that Earth’s dull colours are enough to experience the light of other worlds, and in that, some gratitude too.

We have moved further from representing the invisible through abstract painting. Abstract expressionism has been repeated over the decades and therefore it is more difficult to feel groundbreaking. Imitation is sincere but does not as easily form a connection, and we have new realms to play with. The internet and the ‘intersection of art and technology’ brings us oen into pale pink-grey harmonies. Through screens we observe biomorphic, alien shapes and pastel colours connecting us to an absurd virtual dimension that tries to provoke another indistinct human emotion, something somewhere between disgust, intense information, erotica and mindlessness. As we try to blend the invisible with the virtual into the concrete we attempt to make sense of our new worlds through the digitally abstract. We try to connect, again.

“The spirit, like the body, can be strengthened and developed by frequent exercise.” 4

The spirit akin to the body would diminish if constantly neglected. This thought is necessary for an artist who wishes to exercise that ‘spirit’. Let’s consider the starting point of colour and its direct use. I hesitate to say that no doctor’s waiting room would be painted bright red however warm the shade. The varied powers of red are striking. With skilful use it can be altered depending on what shade of red is paired or shadowed with; vermillion is a sharp red that glows, searching to be cooled by water, and appeased rewardingly by light blue, when blended to brown, it can start to thunder or ring. “Long ago, some thought that our eyes emitted some kind of substance that illuminated, or ‘felt’, what we saw. Others propose the inverse - that objects themselves project a kind of ray that reaches out towards the eye, as if they were looking at us. One split the difference, and postulated that a ‘visual fire’ burns between our eyes and that which they behold.” 5

Following Kandinsky’s thought in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, we can divide colour into two sections: warm/cold, light/dark. Within these, we find variables: warm/dark, cold/light. Colours can be ‘ex-concentric’ and ‘concentric’ . The polarities of warm and cold assigned to yellow and blue respectively act instantly as an appeal to the spirit. As colour becomes closer to yellow from white, it moves towards the spectator. Kandinsky suggested if we were to imagine a circle of yellow and a circle of blue; yellow would move outwardly towards white and blue would move inwardly towards black, drawing away from the viewer. Perhaps this is the reason he denoted these colours for the body (outward) and the spirit (inward) reflecting the external and internal, visible and invisible world. When we change the lightness of a colour, we emphasise its movement, relating it to airiness, dream qualities and peacefulness. Infantile, beaming bliss surrounds us in a light yellow glow. Buttered mist fills the train carriage aer days of monotonous grey and you are happy.

People have dedicated their lives to explaining the essence of something that hovers around the ‘real’ and ‘concrete’. Colour is a tool in that process. Colour demands experience and attention. Suppose the experiment of colour within creativity helps to develop an evolution of spirit which can bring us, even a little, away from the material and earthly suffering. What do we do now? I’m not sure, but I am sure some time staring into the blue of longing, and allowing moments for ourselves to disappear and dissolve into oceanic, infantile joy can’t hurt as a place to rest or to start.

Resources

Wassily Kandinksy, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1910, Part II: About Painting
Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Wave Books, 2009)
Annie Besant, Thought Forms, (Theosophical Publishing Society, 1905), introduction
Wassily Kandinksy, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Part II: About Painting, 1910
Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Wave Books, 2009)

Readings

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost (Canongate Books, 2006) The Blue of Distance Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours 1810, (MIT Press, 1970)

Images

https://www.wikiart.org/en/yves-klein/blue

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16269/16269-h/16269-h.htm

Colour and Feeling: The Blue of Heaven

Anish Kapoor: Monadic Singularity at Liverpool Cathedral