Blue Intensity

This is another of the incredibly striking Dan Flavin pieces that saw at the retrospective at LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) earlier this month.

The sheer blueness of it was particularly striking, I have to say. It was intense. I left the colours from neighbouring pieces at the edges of the image, since I think this helped set the blue in your visual field before you then walk into the corridor and immerse yourself in the blue. I think that helped enhance the blue, but I’m not sure. It was interesting to note that the blue was nowhere near as powerful when starting at the other end of the corridor. (No, this was not my imagination. I was there with a friend, who noticed it too.) It was more of a pleasant light blue when walking in that direction. There were no strong reds and yellows nearby at that end, and I think that is relevant. A possible contributing effect might be the slope of the bulbs -in a sense, they slope away from you as you walk in one direction, and toward you in the other direction- but I can’t see how that alone can enhance the blue like it did. So I think it was the neighbouring colours at one end. It is quite amazing how context-dependent one’s perception of colours and their brightness can be. I wrote a bit about this in a post last year, on CV, about a Categorically Not! event on optical illusions.

All in all, quite remarkable. I recommend going to see these works for real. See my earlier post with a couple more examples.

-cvj