I’ve been making some handmade cards for local shops and for sale online. I’ve been meaning to try and design some to get printed but haven’t had the inspiration (I need to knuckle down and find it!) So for an experiment I had some photos of several of my goddess paintings and pictures done and made cards from them. I’ve played around with colours for variety. Soon I’ll set up a shop page.
Having thought a bit about blue, it was interesting to read a couple of chapters in Rebecca Solnit‘s book ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’. She writes about the colour and discusses various artists like Yves Klein who created blue art and even helped discover a deep blue pigment similar to the lapis lazuli used to paint the Madonna’s robes in medieval paintings. He called it ‘International Klein Blue’.
Here’s an excerpt from ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’:
“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….but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue….the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the colour blue.
….The colour of that distance is the colour of an emotion, the colour of solitude and of desire, the colour of there seen from here, the colour of where you are not. And the colour of where you can never go.”
I like misty blues at the moment rather than striking turquoise blues. My River Goddess ‘Moana’ stands in my living room but is perhaps a little too bright. As she lay on the riverbank of natural winter greens and browns, I thought how like a piece of vivid, fallen sky she was, a window into the earth. What would we do without blue?
While on Havergate Island last year, I had plenty of opportunities to watch, study and photograph the island’s hares. It was a pleasure.
