Blue World

Diving into the Rarest Color

Cyanometer by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, circa 1760.

“The world is blue. Blue has no dimensions; it is beyond dimensions.” – Yves Klein

I’ve been feeling blue lately. Not sad, but immersed in every blue hue: from Lapis lazuli, to Egyptian Blue, Ultramarine, Prussian Blue, and Indigo. I’ve been thinking of blue flowers, blue vegetables, blue pigments, blue sounds.

This is what happens when I dive into a project – my life becomes an extension of that theme. And the past couple months have been dedicated to the color blue, as I’ve been preparing my upcoming event – TASTING COLOR: a Seven Senses Feast. the INDIGO edition.

For those of you who have been reading this newsletter for a while, you may be familiar with this on-going project. In May, I hosted the first TASTING COLOR dinner (the Green edition).

The sensorial dinner series was born out of this newsletter. It originated from my color issue, featuring a photography series by Sophie Calle titled ‘The Chromatic Diet.’ Calle’s photographs were inspired by a fictional character in Paul Auster’s novel ‘Leviathan,’ who ate a different color-themed meal every day of the week.

I became obsessed with this colorful remix of ideas, and I wanted to create my own real-life version. I imagined a dinner series that would include all seven senses centered around a specific color. It took a year for the first sensory event to come together, and the Green dinner was one of my creative highlights of last year.

I’m delighted to announce the next color, a winter-special hue: INDIGO. We’ll be eating blue foods, dining on blue ceramics, listening to blue sounds, and smelling blue florals. Guests will also take home special blue tactile and olfactory treats.

I’ll be hosting this sensorial dinner event March 7th + 8th, in a private residence in Los Angeles. It’s an intimate weekend event, and you can make a reservation online.

To celebrate, I wanted to dedicate this issue to this mesmerizing color, offering you 7 ways of experiencing it through our senses: SEE, HEAR, SMELL, TASTE, TOUCH, BALANCE, and ENVISION.

In Joy,

Sabrina

RELATED TOPICS:

Taste the Rainbow

Green-Colored Glasses

SEE

‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ | book by Rebecca Solnit

Available at indie bookstores and online

I’ve been revisiting Rebecca Solnit’s ‘A Field to Getting Lost,’ as it is a beautiful poetic contemplation on the color blue. The book focuses on the idea of getting lost, as Solnit writes: “The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.”

Weaving in literary research and personal stories, Solnit explores the crucial need for wondering. Every other chapter is dedicated to the color blue (each titled ‘The Blue of Distance’). It covers the color’s history and its symbolism, a quest into longing, loss, and wonder. The first blue chapter opens like this:

“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.”

HEAR

Why Isn't the Sky Blue? | Radiolab

Listen online

This podcast encapsulates some of my favorite findings on the color blue, in just under 20 minutes. Blue is the rarest color in nature (food, plants, animals) and wasn’t part of any language for thousands of years. The podcast dives into the mystery of Homer’s ‘Odyssey,’ which never mentions the color blue.

From there unfolds the fascinating fact that blue is the last color to appear in all languages. In some places, such as Namibia, the Humba tribe don’t distinguish between green and blue. Similarly, in Japanese language the word "ao" (青) is used to reference both green and blue. The Egyptians were the first to have a word for the color blue, and also pioneers in using the color in their artwork.

It seems that we don’t name colors until we can reproduce those colors ourselves. Since blue was the hardest one to recreate, it went unnamed, and in some cases unseen for most of human history. This podcast is a fascinating listen as to how language affects our perception (and vice versa).

SMELL

Olfactory Labyrinth by Maki Ueda

More info online

Whenever I research the sense of smell for these topics, I fall down an olfactory rabbit hole. When it comes to color, a few artists have explored its relationship to smell. The one that caught my nose is the work of Maki Ueda, a Japanese artist who works with scent and has created a variety of color-related projects.

I was fascinated and amused by one of her installations, ‘Olfactory Labyrinth,’ which mimics the experience of a dog following a scented footprint. For this installation, participants were encouraged to try on a variety of colored slippers that each had a specific scent. The slippers left invisible marks that were each dabbed in 30 natural and synthetic ingredients. The audience could then explore, on all fours like a dog, the scent left behind.

For the installation, Maki Ueda included two different pairs of blue slippers: the light blue Slippers had top notes of Eucalyptus oil and the darker blue slippers left a trail of Rosemary oil. You can watch a video of the experience: here.

TASTE

Blue Corn

"Each color of corn represents a cardinal direction for us: yellow to the north, blue to the west, red to the south, and white to the east. Those ears of corn literally represent our place in the world." – Aaron Lowden (member of the Acoma Pueblo)*

Most of us have grown eating the commercially harvested yellow corn, but there are many colorful varieties of corn. Blue corn was originally harvested by the Hopi, the pueblo of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, and several Southeastern Tribes, including the Cherokee. Though native to the continent, many types of corn were eradicated and are now slowly coming back, thanks to various organizations and farmers involved with seed rematriation.

In New Mexico, several communities such as the Acoma Pueblo have dedicated much effort to bringing back these ancient corn varieties. For Indigenous groups, this corn isn’t just a plant, but considered a "plant relative." It is greeted, and even sung to, when people enter the field.

It is used in a variety of ways. Beyond grilling cobs, the Acoma people use it as flour called ‘kuu-maa-wits’ (different name than white corn flour). They also use it in a nourishing drink ‘hi-yaa-nii’ (known as atole in New Mexico and also Mexico). And as a corn mush, known as ‘hi-yaa-shru-nee.’

*source: PBS

TOUCH

Bower Bird’s blue rituals

In the animal kingdom, the one that may prefer blue is probably the bower bird. The males create elaborate bowers, which they decorate exclusively with blue objects: blue flowers, blue feathers, blue shells. They’ll even use human detritus, such as blue candy wrappers, and blue bottle caps and strings.

Once the intricate art installation has been created, the male bower bird will perform his courtship dance to attract a female. The stakes of seduction are high, as bower birds mate for life and only produce a few eggs.

Darwin considered bowers as “the most wonderful instances of bird-architecture yet discovered.” In his 1871 book ‘The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,’ Darwin describes the mating process:

“At times the male will chase the female all over the aviary, then go to the bower, pick up a gay feather or a large leaf, utter a curious kind of note, set all his feathers erect, run round the bower and become so excited that his eyes appear ready to start from his head; he continues opening first one wing then the other, uttering a low, whistling note, and, like the domestic cock, seems to be picking up something from the ground, until at last the female goes gently towards him.”

BALANCE

‘Anthropometries’ | Yves Klein

Out of the many artists that have worked with the color blue, none is more famous than Yves Klein, who developed his own color named after himself (IKB - International Klein Blue). In the 1950s, the artist commissioned a colorist to create the purest blue.

Yves Klein used his signature color to create many of his paintings. He also choreographed a live painting performance titled ‘Anthropometries’, which consisted of nude models becoming anthropomorphic paintbrushes. The models were instructed to press their paint-covered bodies against the paper.

One of the models, Elena Palumbo-Mosca, commissioned for the first Anthropometries works, recounts her experience, stating: “it soon became clear that the creation of the Anthropometries was a kind of ritual: once we had started, the physical impregnation of my body by the blue of Yves (IKB) silently in a very intense atmosphere: Yves - like an ancient priest - just told me where to apply blue. My body impregnated with blue then became a clear symbol of vital energy.”

Art by Alejandra Oviedo

ENVISION

‘The Age Of The Possible’ | Poem by Maria Popova

In my color issue (May 2023), I wrote about the ways color doesn’t exist in objects but in the mind. In fact, many animals experience colors unattainable to the human eye. In doing my recent blue research, I learned that octopus are color-blind but can still perceive yellow and blue shades.

I found this stunning poem about octopus sight written by Maria Popova, originally published for the 40th anniversary issue of Orion Magazine. You can listen to it, or read it below.

THE AGE OF THE POSSIBLE

by Maria Popova

There,

at the bottom of being,

where the water that makes

this planet a world

is the color of spacetime

the octopus —

with her body-shaped mind

and her eight-arm embrace

of alien realities,

with her colorblind vision

sightful of polarized light

and her perpetually awestruck

lidless eye —

can see

shades of blue we cannot conceive.

Call it god

if you must

lean on the homely

to fathom the holiness

of the fathomless whole.

And meanwhile,

up here,

we swim amid particles

we cannot perceive

folded into dimensions

we cannot imagine

to tell stories about

what is real and

what is possible,

and what it means to be.

A blink of time ago

we thought the octopus

impossible,

we thought this blue world

lifeless

below three hundred fathoms

until in 1898 —

an epoch after Bach

scribbled in the margin

of a composition

“Everything that is possible is real” —

we plunged our prosthetic eye

deep into the blue

and found a universe of life.

There,

the octopus,

godless and possible,

lives.