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I have noticed that I use predominantly red in my paintings. My Instagram feed is quite telling in that capacity! For 2022, I would like to explore new color palettes and I have started with blue.

Why blue? For a while, it was not a color that appealed to me at all. Too serious, too cold. I found it only acceptable as a purple i.e., mixed with red!

So, this month I am doing an experiment. Use blue as the main color. I can add a few marks of orange and pink, but I am trying to stick to the rule as best as I can!

Here is one of the paintings: Flame of dreams. Playing on the freeing virtues of the color, breaking out of the frame!

The color is oddly growing on me. I realize how precious and mysterious it actually is. How rare and valued it was for our ancestors. How celestial it can be, coupled with gold. I am very sensitive to its many faces, from the serene to the enigmatic. Evoking faraway lands, mysterious, possibly imaginary, countries, like the below In the western sky. 

Wassily Kandinsky wrote in his 1912 book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, “The deeper blue becomes, the more urgently it summons man toward the infinite, the more it arouses in him a longing for purity and, ultimately, for the supersensual”.

Supersensual. What an evocative term! Literally transcending sense, ideal. For a moment, I thought it meant sensual beyond the norm, engaging all the senses (I am not a native speaker), which would have been a great meaning as well. For I think that this is what paintings and artworks should be, vessels of aesthetic meditation that engage the senses and the imagination.

And now, as I am daydreaming about the evocation of the word supersensual and conjuring up memories of blue, I see the blue city of Samarkand, the turquoise domes of its mosques emerging from the golden dust. As I relive the emotion I felt the day I discovered that fantasized city many years ago, I know I have the subject of my next painting.