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Blau Trägt All Die Sehnsucht, Zu Der Ein Mensch Fähig Ist, In Sich, 2020
Capri
was first used as a colour name in 1920 to describe a shade of blue between cyan and azure.
Capri
refers to the Italian island of Capri, of course, and in particular to the colour of the Mediterranean Sea in its Blue Grotto on any summer afternoon.
Long heated-up afternoons above the sea at Capri, walking from the Via Tragara to the Villa Krupp (was it Gorky’s villa?), walking in airless contemplation of what next, hope, more than a little love, and the sea, as if bluer than God intended, blown out from the island a thousand feet below.
Blue was the first of the spectral colours defined by the artist in
The Chromatika
series. Firrell was struck, in particular, by Rudolf Steiner's writings about the illusiveness of blue. The first prototype anticipated colour coded type, in this instance using the blue associated with the United Nations.
Goethe equated blue with negation and shadow, darkness and coldness. He called it ‘a contradiction between excitement and repose’. Blue retreats from us into the night, a pied piper of a colour with humanity as its rats and waylaid children.
Blue is darkness streaming through light, withdrawing, eliciting our longing to follow it. Blue gleams dimly in the darkness, a retreating beacon, and it’s human nature to reach out with greater conviction for what seems almost impossible to grasp.
Blue cannot be followed or found. It colours the immensity of the sea and the sky, but the summer sky is illusory. Visit the upper atmosphere and the sky turns slowly dark as the blackness of space re-asserts itself. Blue is simply, categorically, not there. Blue is nothing more than an achingly beautiful idea, perennially denied.
The sweep of blue draws back, pulled by the moon to another shore. Everywhere blue steps back from us so that we will step forward:
The sea was deep blue with white horses on it, white surf, thunderous noise and wind. And the tide was low so we swam. It was cold and the water was very clear. Cold and dark, running towards us in low foam hurdles with no trace of blue now. We had tried to swim out to the blue and found only colourless seawater full of cold clarity. A little further up the beach there was a ridge of shingle and sand just high enough to make shelter from the wind. We looked up at racing clouds, and saw the paler, mythic blue of the sky set with a herb-green star, Venus perhaps.
About the colour blue in particular, the artist writes:
I love the way blue light seems to be moving away from you, and yet it is also light travelling towards you in the darkness. Rudolf Steiner said that blue gives the impression of retreating away from us and this makes us want to move towards it, to follow it, to reach out for it. I felt that if you had the perfect blue, it would be a perfect expression of longing. In fact, it would contain all the longing a human being could ever feel.
Ich liebe die Art, wie das blaue Licht sich von Dir zu entfernen scheint, und doch ist es Licht, das in der Dunkelheit auf dich zukommt. Rudolf Steiner sagte, dass Blau den Eindruck erweckt sich von uns zu entfernen, und dieser Umstand erweckt den Wunsch in uns, darauf zuzugehen, es zu verfolgen, danach zu greifen. Ich fühlte, dass mit dem perfekten Blau auch die Sehnsucht perfekt ausgedrückt werden könnte. Es würde alle Sehnsucht beinhalten derer ein menschliches Wesen jemals zu fühlen fähig wäre.
