I knew there would be 16 shades of blue, but what did I really want to say about these blues? "blue's chromatic scale corresponds to an emotional spectrum of highly complex associations that move from the airy transparency linked with joy to the saturated depths we connect with sorrow". Siri Hustvedt in her book 'mysteries of the rectangle'.
One idea was to take a blue landscape, create a paint by number of it, and have 16 blues as reference colors.
Not my wheelhouse, but I spent a bit of time exploring how to do this.
I then took a Cezanne blue landscape and pulled it into ColorSnap and identified 16 shades of Blue (via Sherwin Williams). Again, not sure how to execute on this other than a mixed media collage sort of thing. It was really just part of the process of examining this idea.
I had already explored taking the actual blue names (good conscience red and blue, Egyptian blue, hermetic blue, thunderstorm blue, completely supportless blue) and creating abstract paintings in 2014/2015, so I didn't want to repeat that effort.
Finally, the statement Paula Modersohn-Becker made about Cezanne's work to Rilke really called out to me. Like a great thunderstorm. And the thunderstorm blue in Letters on Cezanne was a description of 'the black clock'--the original source of Tori Amos song. See, finally coming full circle to the original inspiration. I also latched onto the statement by Cezanne that he himself considered the colors as numinous essences. All this felt more in-line with my voice. Because Rilke talked often of marrying dread and bliss, I looked for that pairing of polarities. Thunderstorm/rage/energy--Respite/safety/calm. When doing the ColorSnap above I had noted that many of the blues had respite like names. So, the final idea to execute became one thunderstorm blue painting sharing a space with many small respite blue paintings (pulled from Sherwin Williams) to make up the 16 shades of blue. Showing the range of blues in a numinous essence way and consistent with my atmospheric landscape voice. here are 4 of the respite blues in progress to give you just a tas