The blue
[Translation:
Anne Clerget]
French text
[Recommended reading :
The colours in the French language, Pourpre.com
The blue colour, Pourpre.com]
|
Blue is one of the poor relations of the family of pigments: it is
less common than the other colours (except maybe for green and purple)
although chemical synthesis of previous centuries improved this
situation. Before, mankind had to show great ingenuity to extract
some blue from its environment. Just like green, blue is very present
around us (sky) and has been in demand among artists for a long time.
Maybe because of this rarity or because this colour is associated to
the sky, to the Divine, in most of the regions of the world, blue -
which is also the colour of the veins, of the shadow and of the night
- could surprise, disquiet, repulse,or even frighten (see
Terror of Roman legions,
international fears),
mostly in its purplish versions which are very cool and quite absent
in the nature. It has been sometimes the colour of mourning,
including in the Christian West. |
Summary
Classification
Precisions
|
 Like
red,
blue is one of the colours the most renowned for their power of fascination,
not lacking in sensuality. How many peoples used it in makeup to reinforce
the seduction of a look, or in painting and sculpture to evoke an unsetting
exoticism, a god or a mysterious power ?
In the XVIIIth century, blue was fashionable again. But the
fashion brings maybe its most intense moment today: from a radio station to
a football team, including telephone numbering and masses of commercial
services, blue became in all the western world the object of an adoration
that was unimaginable a thousand or two thousands years ago, and still today
in other cultures. It has maybe lost the negative aspect of its past
symbolic signification because it is not so rare anymore. Blue is less
surprising,less frightnening and gives away its true nature, tinged with sky
and night.
Classification
The different blues can be sorted in two distinct
categories that we took up in this website :
* the
"warm" blues, whose most
important current references are copper
phtalocyanine blue,
manganese blue and
ceruleum blue.
* the
medium or cool blues. A
light ultramarine blue is close to a cobalt blue, then rather medium. A dark ultramarine tends clearly to purplish. In any
case, these colours of reference, which are quite recent, are among the
coolest and the darkest of the palette except for blacks, some violets and
some browns. They are often put together with mauves, purples, reds (giving
purples) and oranges (giving all ranges of earth colours) or yellows (giving
some kinds of green earth).
Precisions
Payne's grey
which is almost a blue is discussed in the
section of the grey.
About the
adage "the blue takes away", read the article
Families of colours.
Retour
début de page
|
|
Communication
|
