Blue

“Have nothing in your house or on your boat that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

Wm. Morris, as adapted. To which I’d add:

There is no need for decoration; decoration is not design.

This is often misunderstood in the English culture (culture being the learned behaviour that encodes an intergenerational process, AKA humanity’s persistence). The boat shown here follows this dictum and is unusual in that the majority of modern narrowboats are painted to ape a long-gone era when canals had a working life; boats had stripes, decorations and other designs to signify ownership and operation. The two blues I have chosen are by Designers Guild; SAINTE CHAPELLE NO. 54 and PRUSSIAN BLUE NO. 52.

Blue is clearly an important and beautiful colour. It is the colour of a jacket I own and is offset by the vibrant orange hat, in this picture from the bathroom. A limited edition.

on blue

As an aside… why is the sky blue?

The sky appears blue to the human eye as the short waves of blue light are scattered more than the other colours in the spectrum, making the blue light more visible. I have used the common shorthand here, ‘wave’. Though of course, light is light and manifests as both a particle and a wave.

When the Sun's light reaches the Earth's atmosphere, it is scattered, or deflected, by atmospheric gases, mostly, nitrogen and oxygen. Because these molecules are much smaller than the wavelength of visible light, the amount of scattering depends on the wavelength. This effect is called Rayleigh scattering, named after Lord Rayleigh, who first discovered it.

Shorter wavelengths (violet and blue) are scattered the most strongly, so more of the blue light is scattered towards our eyes than the other colours. You might wonder why the sky doesn't actually look purple since the violet light is scattered even more strongly than blue. This is because there isn't as much violet in sunlight to start with, and our eyes are much more sensitive to blue.

You might also notice that the sky tends to be most vibrant overhead and fades to pale as it reaches the horizon. This is because the light from the horizon has had further to travel through the air, and so has been scattered and rescattered. The Earth's surface also plays a role in scattering and reflecting this light. As a result of this increased amount of scattering, the dominance of blue light is decreased, and so we see an increased amount of white light.

IKB (International Klein Blue)

An outstanding blue. No account of the colour could, or should, ignore IKB. “At his (Yves Klein 1928–1962) 1957 exhibition in Milan, he displayed a series of eleven ostensibly identical blue monochromes, each with a different price which he claimed reflected its unique spirit. As he explained: 'Each blue world of each painting, although the same blue and treated in the same way, presented a completely different essence and atmosphere”

Nor ignore the latest blue.

Ylnmn

The crudities of the technology here fail us. Missing the intensity of colour and the difference between IKB and YlnMn. Shown here as slightly less refulgent than IKB but this isn’t the case ‘in reality’.

YInMn Blue (/jɪnmɪn/; for the chemical symbols Y for yttrium, In for indium, and Mn for manganese), also known as Oregon Blue or Mas Blue, is an inorganic blue pigment that was discovered by Mas Subramanian and his (then) graduate student, Andrew Smith, at Oregon State University in 2009. The YlnMn Blue story may be found here.