Beating the Blues
Beating the Blues, mixed media, 2024
What is it about the colour blue? It’s so seductive and enticing, like blue skies or the blue sea that brings joy to my heart.
The Russian born artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) considered blue to be the most spiritual of colours.
“…the deeper the blue the more It beckons man Into the Infinite, arousing a longing for purity and the super sensuous.” Kandinsky: Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1910.
Yet blue is also considered a melancholy colour. When we have the ‘blues’ it signifies that we are depressed or not so happy. I was talking to an artist at her exhibition recently and asked her about why she painted birds. “To keep me from getting depressed” she said. It’s a valid point!
This week I have also had ‘the blues’, being sick and in bed most days. Brief forays into the studio have not amounted to anything. I have felt decidedly uninspired by some of the cyanotype works I had put aside to resolve this month. Even though the deep blues formed by sun print cyanotypes continue to seduce me, no matter what I did these pieces seemed to mock me.
In desperation I cut up the two canvases I had and kept the little ‘window collages’. Without any expectations I put four of these 10 x 10 cm collages together as a grid and really liked them. Instead of four separate artworks these could be brought together on the one canvas, using another artwork made at that time which was as yet unresolved.
I played around for a bit then committed to this configuration and glued them down. I was quite pleased with the result, Beating the Blues which is a combination of two different thoughts around my ongoing Stone Stories project which I started in 2022.
It also helped me feel a bit better within myself by actually producing something after a week of lying around in bed resting and reading (and binge watching Netflix serials like Queen’s Gambit).
The only remedy I’ve found for pulling myself out of depression is to keep making work. It doesn’t have to be a whole new theme, it can be variations or recycling of old works into new configurations. Sometimes they just have to hang around long enough for you to finally get sick of them, in order to cut or tear them up and make something new.
The result is that I’ve now got some spare bits of canvas I’ve taken off the frames and I will make into removable sketchbook covers. The canvas covers can be reused over again when the sketchbooks fill up.
From two unresolved canvases has come a whole new way of looking at my unresolved artworks. Something to remember next time I’m feeling a little of the blues melancholia.
Canvas covers for sketchbooks in the making
