From space the earth is a blue planet, dominated by elements that are fundamental to all living things. Blue was, is and always will be at the very heart of our visual experience.
Dulux is suggesting that Denim Drift and its palatte of associated tints and tones are the colours we might all want to turn to when decorating our homes and places of work in the year to come. Here we look at some of the artists that have been compelled to use the colour.
Some of the earliest uses of blue in painting derive from a desire to convey the holy and divine. Renaissance painters used the vivid luxury pigment to clothe depictions of Madonna with Child , a tradition that carried on for centuries.
British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner used a vast array of blue tones in his paintings during the 1700-1800s. He was steadfast in his quest to capture the power and beauty of the natural world through the ever-changing sea and sky that form our horizons.
The 20 th Century saw a number of artists fascinated by the colour. The expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter, formed in 1909 by Wassily Kandinsky, sought to celebrate the groups shared love of what they saw to be a spiritual colour with the ability to bring us closer to the eternal. French artist Henri Matisse, a leader of the Fauvists, used strident colour in his work from the turn of the 20 th Century onwards, with blue playing a central role in conveying distance and volume in pieces such as Dance and his single colour cut outs of nudes.
Mark Rohtko, an abstract expressionist colour purist, used dark shades of blue blocks in a number of his paintings to convey deep human emotion throughout the 1950s. At around the same time, Yves Klein invented a whole new blue. Named International Klein Blue he applied it in a number of ways including pure, beguiling solid colour printed onto canvas via naked female bodies.
Filmmaker Derek Jarman chose blue as the colour to film, again in singular and solid form, as the sole visual reference in his film of the same name in 1993. Made and released months before the artist's death due to AIDs, the audio soundtrack of the artist and actor's friends sharing details of his life forms the ultimate spiritual experience in touching the eternal.
