Blue Monday

January 21 is designated as ‘Blue Monday’: the day most likely to result (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) in depression and winter ennui. The holidays are over, the weather often sucks, summer vacations are a long way away, the job market scares us, we’ve already broken many of our New Year’s resolutions…you get the picture.

I’ve never associated ‘blue’ with depression. Brown and gray, maybe – those are the dry, barren, windswept colors of a Southwestern winter up on the Colorado Plateau.

As might be obvious, I like blue. All shades of it, from icy blue-white and the iconic Southwest turquoise, to electric blue and deepest midnight; the blue of sky, of distance, of a Himalayan poppy or a morning glory flower. It is at once a ubiquitous color (most shadows are blue, not black) and an unexpected color (before Better Living Through Chemistry, blue dyes were nearly as sought-after as true red and purple.)

In color theory and psychology, blue tones have been attributed to serenity, intellect, and religious mystery. In music, ‘the Blues’ are deeply misunderstood by outsiders – this isn’t a music to make you even more depressed, but to ground you, give you hope, endurance, and the certain knowledge you aren’t the only human to feel this way.

Some blue things I love:

Pollia Condensata. This tropical plant has no nutritional value, but humans and some bird species treasure it for the long-lasting, iridescent blue berries. I first heard about it some years back. Pollia berries are one inspiration for the opalescent blue gir trees in my fantasy world. At over a thousand feet tall, the gir look more like weeping willows than tiny Pollia plants. But I like to imagine those flashing rainbow-blue leaves catching the orange-yellow sunlight of an alien afternoon.

I even made a necklace, one of those semi-secret projects I can wear at a writers’ or art convention. ‘Blue Leaf’ takes a dichroic glass cabochon, wraps it in a beaded bezel, and adds bead-woven leaves and a heavily-patterned beaded rope. It will get second looks and compliments, but only a few people will know its inspiration.

Blue tones – and trees – show up a lot in my art, even in pieces that are laden with other colors. ‘Jewel Vista 1 – 4’ are 30″x18″x2″ acrylic on pieced linen canvases, among the first things I did after leaving a nearly ten-year stint at a commercial art firm where I wasn’t allowed to sell my own artwork (even on the side.) Clockwise, they are ‘Rubies at Dawn’, ‘Jade at Noon’, ‘Opals at Midnight’, and ‘Sapphires at Sunset’.