blue, blue pigment, calm, copper azurite, craft, Girl with a Pearl Earring, lapis lazuli, love of making, oil on canvas, shimmering, The Lacemaker, ultramarine, Vermeer

The Blue of Vermeer…

30th November

  The much loved seventeenth century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer remains something of an enigma, even today.   After his death in 1675, unlike many artists, Vermeer did not leave behind any drawings or plans of his paintings, nor any diaries.  Yet we have come to recognise and relish the idyllic quality that Vermeer captures in...

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blue horizon, Blue Verditer, cobalt blue, Goethe, Indigo, John Ruskin, luminosity, oil on canvas, pigments, Prussian blue, The Fighting Temeraire, The Royal Academy of Arts, Theory of Colours, Turner, white sails

Watching the White Sails in the Heart of the Ocean…

23rd November

“Do we dream, or does the white forked sail drift nearer, and nearer yet, diminishing the blue sea between us with the fullness of its wings?” John Ruskin on Turner In The Fighting Temeraire, it has long been presumed that Turner’s viewpoint would have been the London Embankment, watching as the famous and victorious Temeraire ship...

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