"The Blue of Distance"

This article, by Rebecca Solnit, ponders the color blue and looks at it as the color that signifies distance.  She observes that as you look towards the horizon, landscapes and objects blur their edges and take on a bluish hue.  Solnit notes, "The color of that distance is the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not.  And the color of where you can never go" (13).  She sees this blue distance as almost a world unto itself, especially when looking at paintings, beginning in the fifteenth century, when European painters first began to paint "the blue of distance."  In these paintings, blue was used to create depth but was often overused and mixed a little too brightly, creating a separate faraway land.  Solnit ends her rumination by speaking of the contrast between how children and adults think about distance.  Children, on the one hand, often only see the here and now.  What is far away and out of sight holds little interest.  The blue of distance is a realization that comes with time, something that comes with experiencing sadness and the complexities of life.  With maturity comes increasing observation and appreciation of little things like this blue remoteness.  

Here is one of the paintings mentioned by Solnit in her article:

Hans Memling's Triptych of the Resurrection, 1490

I loved the way this piece was written; I think it was very eloquent and thoughtfully put.  Here is one quote that I especially liked: 

"The mental landscape of the young is like that of medieval paintings: a foreground full of vivid things and then a wall.  The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel...[P]erhaps maturity brings with it...an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings, and finds beauty in the faraway" (15).