The Sky Wasn’t Always Blue

READ More: How the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis explains color perception and language.

READ MORE: Why is Blue so rare?

READ MORE: CREATING BLUE

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Ok, so bear with me for a moment and close your eyes. Imagine a sky. What color do you see? I’ll bet it’s blue? /good guess/ But, which blue? Are you and I seeing the same deep violet blue of dawn? Or are you seeing a brilliant rich cyan from a summer day? What color is blue? The ocean? The shimmer of a dragonfly? Maybe your friend’s eyes? 

But what’s really intriguing me is this: If I didn't have a word for blue, would I still be able to imagine it?

Go ahead try it. Try to think of a color that doesn't have a name. Likely, you will start to classify your imagined color as part of a range, or an alternative to a pre-determined hue. Maybe you’re seeing a light purple, or a soft green?

And I’m genuinely asking, because I read recently that all of human civilization didn’t actually have a word for blue, for quite awhile. According to linguistic scholars, it’s almost as if we didn’t see blue for millenia. Well, more accurately, I’m sure we ‘saw’ it, but didn’t      it as anything but just a nameless hue in the spectrum. That is of course until we decided to name it. 

As an artist, this has gotten me thinking about nature, language color and our perception of it. It turns out, it’s surprisingly hard for us to ‘see’ anything that doesn’t have a name. If that doesn't make total sense yet, I get it. But let’s hold on to that thought for later. 

The Ancient Greeks are a great example. Despite their amazing advancements in science and knowledge, they had no word for blue. In The Odyssey, Homer's descriptions of color can be, at times, well, bizarre: a sky is the color of bronze, stars are iron or copper, sheep are red, and and lions are honey green. Most conspicuous is the complete absence of the color blue in an epic story that literally takes place on the ocean. Instead, Homer describes the sea as "wine-dark", and does this quite often. Scholars argue that the ancient Greeks saw blue, green and gray as more or less the same range of color. 

If you’re like me, that’s difficult to get my head around. Blue is like RIGHT THERE. But I think that’s only because I have a word for blue that I use when I look at the world every day. 

The Egyptians were some of the first people to have a word for blue. But their invention of the word only coincided with their invention of blue as a pigment, hsbyd irit (artificial lapis). It’s a brilliant bright almost turquoise blue that the Egyptians first created for depicting their gods in paintings and craft. they felt blue was the only color worthy of depicting their gods in paintings and craft. This color, that still exists in preserved historic sites today, was the first ever synthetically produced color.  Think about it, the first people to call something blue were artists creating a new color, a new pigment for representing the world. 

And apparently, creating blue was exceedingly difficult. This wasn’t as easy as getting black from charcoal, red from ochre, or white from chalk. Blue required considerable effort and ingenuity from the Egyptians, as well as those in ancient Afghanistan and China. And words for the color blue only seem to coincide with the creation of the pigment. It’s as if we only bothered to name the color after we created it for our own use.  

And it sort of makes sense that we would take our time to create blue, because blue is so incredibly rare in nature. There is no true blue pigment in plants. Plants can only achieve blue by mixing pigments and varying PH balance.

And blue is even rarer in animals. Of 1.5 million living animal species identified, fewer than 1%, exhibit blue. And even with these 1%, there is no actual blue substance or pigment, but rather a light scattering effect. Take butterflies are a perfect example. Microscopic beads on their wings cancel every wavelength of light, out except blue. It’s a magic trick. In fact, in a way, a blue butterfly is actually everything but blue. Dragonflies, Bluejays, bluebirds, a mandrill’s nose and rear end, These blues are simply an iridescence of light that exhibits as blue. Even chameleons and iguanas control their skin to scatter light to show virtually any color. 

In fact blue is so rare in nature, fewer than 10 animals, including the olive-wing butterfly, and a robin’s eggs, are examples of a true blue pigment in animals. Of millions of animal species on earth, we literally can count on two hands the number of animals who pulled off the miracle of creating blue.

Oh and the sky we were imagining before, it isn’t actually blue either. It’s just that different wavelengths of light get absorbed when the sun is at different angles. Which is why the sky turns different colors throughout the day… it's an immense sort of prism

So, ok this makes sense. Blue is incredibly rare in nature, and it was equally difficult to create on our own. No wonder languages took their time before getting around to create a name for this color. Seems like a word for blue was sort of a luxury. 

And it’s not just blue. Orange came along even later. For millenia, speakers of Western Languages just said “yellow-red”. In India, there was a word for a fruit with a fragrant citrus smell, the sanskrit name was (again butchering this) something like nāraṅgii. It wasn’t until 15th century, like 700 years ago, when oranges were brought to Europe that we started associating an object with a specific color, and only then did we start identifying a separate hue. Oh, that flower, that is similar to the color of this orange. It’s not red, it’s not yellow. That flower is orange. 

It’s a metaphor from Nature.

Of course, we name color after nature all the time. Lime, Pistachio, Violet. Cornflower, Turquoise. 

Crayola crayons reference nature throughout: carnation pink, watermelon pink, and flamingo pink. 

Pink, is itself really just a tint, that is, adding white to a red hue. Pink is actually a good example today. It’s not hard to imagine a time when pink could’ve easily been called light red. 

Yet if I look at the color, I can’t see anything BUT pink. My natural world has been defined for me through a lens of labels, of words, that tell me what I’m looking at. 

But as children we used a different lens. Let’s go back to the Crayolas. A basic pack has 10 colors. Green, blue, violet was always more than enough for us to represent the blues in the world. A larger pack of Crayolas adds names for blue, blue green, blue violet, red violet, and violet (parentheses purple). The largest pack has 120 Crayola crayon colors, including 20 shades of green, 19 shades of blue. Sounds like a lot, but the human eye can detect up to 10 million different hues. So all of a sudden 120 doesn’t seem like enough, even though 10 used to be plenty. So how do we get by, so ignorant of the rest of the spectrum? 

I like to do thought experiments sometimes to help me. Let’s reverse all of this. Imagine we’re walking into a paint store. Hundreds of names for colors that are utterly exotic, and some are pretty silly… I actually looked up a few just for fun: Arsenic, Spill The Wine, Dead Salmon, Simmer Down, Disco Nap, Ghost Tree. Ok, so. Some of these colors referencing things we know, like wine or a dead fish. So, you might be able to guess as to their approximate color. Others… we would have no idea.  

This feeling of having no idea what color a word represents is exactly how it would have felt to the Greeks in 750 BCE if we pointed up and said “the sky is blue” (In Greek of course). I think even when blue was pointed out to them, I imagine it would feel like an extraneous label, just like the colors at the paint store. In fact, I’ve seen this color ‘Simmer Down’ (a putty orange cream color) quite often, but I wouldn’t know to call it anything but orangey, until just now. Calling this Simmer Down feels just as extraneous and silly to us as ‘blue’ might have felt to Greeks thousands of years ago. Conversely, wine dark feels like a really nice paint color that should be added to your neighborhood paint store. 

So ok, maybe interesting. But why does a history lesson about blue matter to my journal on nature, art and design? Well, because as an artist I always want to make sure I am never taking for granted why I perceive things as I do. And more importantly, taking notice when my perception of something as seemingly basic as a color, seems to actually based on rules that I’ve come to accept. 

This is blue. That is not blue. 

Remember the beginning of this journal, imagining the sky?  Seeing blue in our minds? Along the way, we all decided that the sky is Blue, and no longer bronze as Home described. That the ocean is no longer wine dark. In fact, for Homer, he saw blue, together with the gray and green of the ocean as its own beautiful medley. It’s really quite poetic. Who is really to say which is a better description of what things look like? 

And a better question: Do labels and definitions of the natural world, help us or hurt us? Well, I agree it probably helps us understand and decipher our world when we have names for things. More importantly, it helps us communicate to have a shared understanding of things.  

But that begs the question. If we didn’t always have a word for blue, or orange, and just today I learned about Simmer Down, What else is out there that my eyes are seeing but I’m not noticing, simply because I don’t have a name for it? 

Labeling things may help us see things, but, what gets omitted? Words don’t explain, as much as they simplify.  “Wine dark” revealed to the Greeks an infinity of hues and it was good enough for their best writers. Goes without saying, The Odyssey is still considered a classic today, even without the color blue,....perhaps because it lacks it. 

Here’s what I am seeing: Words are great at organizing nature’s chaos, but they aren’t good at helping us explore it.

As an artist, it’s not my job to simplify things. Or necessarily to label them. In fact, it’s the unknown things that I am looking to unearth. And apparently, there’s an infinity of undiscovered colors, not to mention shapes, forms, ideas, and thoughts. 

It’s these things, the nameless things yet totally undescribed that artists are meant to uncover. Art reveals new ways of seeing, new lenses. After all, don’t forget that even the Egyptians first created blue pigment just for their art. As Artists, we show the world what has been hiding in plain sight, nameless, right in front of our eyes the whole time. 

So, in that sense, let me try this again. When I close my eyes, and think of the sky, what do I see. Ok, maybe It’s still blue. But honestly, it’s also black for more or less the same amount of time as its blue. And inbetween it is pink, red, orange, scarlet, violet, vermillion, and green. And Simmer Down is in there too. And Some days it stays grey all day, or a faded white. And also, as we’ve learned, sometimes, it’s none of those colors but perhaps just the absence of others. 

But this is the path I am on as an artist. 

And I am reminded that the nameless infinity of nature is my truest teacher. 

As I walk outside today, may I try to see the things that I have no name for, and wonder what they could be.