Blue : Lynda Wilson

Blue

new work by Lynda Wilson

October 9 - November 5,  2105

preview Friday October 9 5.30 - 7pm

“I’ve lost count of the songs I’ve written with the word blue in the title. I just love the word blue” (Jeff Lynne)

But until recent history blue was not in our vocabulary. Ancient languages did not have a word for blue – not the Greek, the Chinese, the Japanese, not the Hebrew. Lazarus Geiger (a German philosopher and philologist in the 1800’s) studied Icelandic sagas, the Koran, ancient Chinese stories, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible – blue could not be found.

So if we didn’t have a word for blue, did it exist? Could we see blue? How did we describe the sky? Hindu Vedic hymns of more than ten thousand lines described at great length the heavens in all their glory but never once mentioned that the sky is blue. How right Jeff Lynne was when he sang “Mr. Blue Sky, please tell us why you had to hide away for so long, so long…”

Geiger then investigated the history of colour in language and discovered an interesting fact around the world. Black and white or light and dark were the first references to colour, next came red, after that yellow and green (sometimes yellow and green were reversed) and last of all came blue. The Egyptians were the only ancient culture to have a word for blue and as it happens they were also the only culture to manufacture a blue dye.

But blue in nature is actually quite rare. Blue eyes aren’t common, animals aren’t blue, blue flowers have mostly been engineered by humans. Is the sky blue? The oceans and rivers? Not always.

Jules Davidoff (Professor of Psychology, Goldsmiths University of London) states that when we don’t have a word to describe a colour, it is a lot harder for us to recognise what is unique about it and to distinguish it as different.

So it would seem that blue was there all along, it was not lost, it had not hidden away, but our ability to adore the glorious hue was yet to be discovered.

“Hey there Mr. Blue, we're so pleased to be with you
Look around see what you do
Everybody smiles at you”