ArtNow Report - Ed. 11 - Eng.

Edition 11

April

April 2026

2026

Edition 11

April 2026

r e p o r t

ArtNow

Giotto’s sky blue. Sea blue. Iemanjá’s blue. Hokusai’s wave blue. Vermeer’s

turban blue. Chagall’s dream blue. Klein’s void blue. The blue of tears before

Rothko. Miró’s cosmos blue. The sky Turrell framed in blue. The pigment blue

that cost more than gold. The laboratory blue that captured the impossible.

The ocean blue that is disappearing. The clear-sky blue that became

memory. Blue that calms. Blue that transcends. Blue that civilization has

pursued for six thousand years.

Everything is blue.

Seven Centuries in Search

of the Perfect Blue

Seven Centuries in Search

of the Perfect Blue

Raw lapis lazuli, extracted from the Sar-e-Sang mines in Afghanistan. For

centuries, every gram of this stone traveled for months along the Silk Road

before reaching the hands of a painter—and it was worth more than gold.

FROM AFGHAN LAPIS

LAZULI TO PRUSSIAN BLUE

— HOW THE MOST

EXPENSIVE PIGMENT IN

HISTORY BECAME THE

COLOR OF BEAUTY, THE

SACRED, AND STRENGTH

There was a color medieval men prized more than gold. Not because it was

more beautiful—though it was—but because it was harder to obtain. It came

from a mountain in Afghanistan, traveled for three months along the Silk Road

in sealed pouches, arrived in the workshops of Venice and Florence as an

almost sacred substance, and was weighed before it was touched. They called

it ultramarine. Beyond the sea. The color the world could not contain.

The Sar-e-Sang mine has existed for at least six thousand years.

Archaeologists have found traces of lapis lazuli in the funerary ornaments of

Ur, dating back to 3000 BCE; the eyes of Tutankhamun’s mask are lined with

the same stone. The Romans called it sapphirus, confusing it with the mineral

we now know as sapphire. It was so rare that most European languages didn’t

even have a precise name for its color.

Turning the stone into pigment was a laborious and closely guarded process:

it was ground down, mixed with resins and oils, heated, and kneaded in water

until the impurities floated and the pure blue sank. The result was sold in three

grades of quality. The finest—oltremare finissimo—was reserved for the most

sacred subjects and the wealthiest patrons.

And it was precisely for the sacred that it was used. The medieval Catholic

Church needed a color that could represent the divine without relying on

gold, which was already omnipresent in Byzantine icons. Blue—rare and of

almost unreachable origin—became the robe of the Virgin Mary. By the 12th

century, it was decided: the most expensive color in the world would be the

color of the Mother of God.

Blue was not a chromatic choice. It was a statement of

value. To paint something in blue was to say: this is

worth more than you can possibly imagine.

Replica of the funerary mask of Tutankhamun, c. 1323 BCE.

Giotto di Bondone, ceiling of the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, c. 1304–1306. The

deep blue, scattered with golden stars, replaced the Byzantine gold that once

covered medieval church ceilings—and, for the first time in Western art, brought

the sky into human time.

Giotto di Bondone, ceiling of the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, c. 1304–1306. The

deep blue, scattered with golden stars, replaced the Byzantine gold that once

covered medieval church ceilings—and, for the first time in Western art, brought

the sky into human time.

In 1304, a painter named Giotto di Bondone began work on a small

chapel in Padua, Italy. The patron was Enrico Scrovegni, a wealthy

banker seeking to atone for his father’s sins of usury. The result was

the Scrovegni Chapel—and one of the most radical gestures in the

history of Western art.

Before Giotto, church ceilings were gold. The sky was represented in

gold—the color of eternity, of placelessness, of divine presence

beyond time. Giotto chose to paint the ceiling blue. A deep, saturated

blue, made from the finest lapis lazuli, which cost his patron a fortune.

But the gesture went beyond cost: Giotto was saying that the sky was

not a golden abstraction. It was a real place. It had color. It had

depth. It could be seen and felt.

Giotto’s blue is not the sky of any ordinary afternoon. It is a blue that

exists only in the imagination—what people see when they think of

what the sky should be: intense, perfect, cloudless, without limit. It is

blue before physics. The blue of belief.

With this gesture, Giotto introduced something that Western art

would take centuries to fully absorb: the idea that color could carry

its own weight, presence, and meaning, independent of the object it

represents. The Virgin’s robe in the fresco is also blue—but it is the

ceiling that matters. It is the ceiling that makes us look up and feel

that there is something above us worth reaching for.

Giotto and the First True Sky

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, c. 1665. Oil on canvas, 17.5 × 15.4 in.

Mauritshuis, The Hague. The blue turban—painted with the finest ultramarine

available, in ultrathin layered glazes—does not reflect light. It absorbs it and

returns it transformed.

Three centuries later, in Delft, Vermeer used the same pigment in a

completely different way. Not to paint the infinite—but to paint intimacy.

The turban in Girl with a Pearl Earring, around 1665, is likely the most famous

piece of fabric in the history of art—not because of its beauty, but because of

the impossible: how does that blue shine without being a source of light? The

answer lies in Vermeer’s technique of layering ultrathin glazes of ultramarine

at varying intensities, creating an optical depth the eye perceives as inner

light. The turban does not reflect—it absorbs and returns transformed.

But there is something beyond technique. The blue frames the face of a

young woman in a suspended moment—she has turned, has been called, is

about to leave. It transforms an ordinary instant into a quiet eternity. The

ultramarine that came from unreachable mountains ends here: at the temple

of an anonymous woman, making her unforgettable.

Vermeer and the Blue That Touches the Skin

Vermeer’s

blue

does

not

adorn

the

woman.

consecrates her. Like the Virgin’s robe—but without

ceremony—just light, just fabric, just the face of

someone who looks back.

Around 1700, the world of painting was in crisis. Ultramarine

remained expensive and scarce, and artists in Northern Europe

needed an alternative. In 1704, a laboratory accident in Berlin solved

the problem: a paint maker mistakenly used potash contaminated

with animal blood while attempting to produce a red pigment. The

result was an intense, dense, and affordable blue unlike anything

seen before.

Prussian Blue had arrived—and for the first time in history, blue was

within reach of artists without wealthy patrons.

The most dramatic impact was not in Europe, but in Japan. Around

1820, the pigment arrived through Dutch imports, and Hokusai, then

in his sixties, adopted it with almost compulsive urgency. The Great

Wave off Kanagawa, from 1831, is the result: the most widely

reproduced woodblock print in human history uses Prussian Blue to

create something ultramarine never could—a color at once opaque

and transparent, heavy as the sea and light as mist. It is not a

representation of the ocean. It is the ocean as we feel it when we are

small before it.

The affordable pigment democratized blue. In Hokusai’s hands, it

became more powerful than ever.

The Crisis of Blue and the Invention of Its Substitute

Editorial

Art Now Report is a magazine dedicated to

the dissemination of contemporary art in all

its forms and expressions. Our goal is to

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April 2026

Painting

Sculpture

Design

Photography

Emmanuel Gillespie

The Blue Frequency of

Affection

The Blue Frequency of

Affection

To contemplate Emmanuel Gillespie’s work is to enter a field of

resonance where the everyday is not merely recorded, but transformed

through a membrane of radiant blues and deep purples. Subverting the

tradition that associates blue with melancholy, Gillespie uses it as a

conductor of light — an electric atmosphere that reveals the

temperature of affection and the sovereignty of being in its most

ordinary moments.

Based in Dallas, the artist conducts an archaeology of the soul within the

terrain of the familiar. A woman lost in thought on a park bench, the

stillness of a ballerina, or a suspended conversation between friends

become, through his palette, moments of absolute clarity. Gillespie

constructs a sanctuary for what is “seen and safe,” proving that self-love

is the radiance that makes connection possible; love as a practice of

self-reflection and dignity.

What is striking in his poetics is the rehabilitation of solitude. His solitary

figures, bathed in tones of indigo, cobalt, and deep violet, do not evoke

abandonment. On the contrary, they emanate a quiet fullness, an intact

autonomy. Gillespie reminds us that self-love is, above all, the ability to

inhabit one’s own company with comfort. Blue here functions as a

second skin — an aura that shields his subjects and allows them to exist

fully, without the need to perform for the viewer.

Blackness in his work is treated with lyrical reverence. Far removed from

stereotypes of pain or overt struggle, he claims the right to rest, leisure,

and contemplation. It is a subtle political gesture translated into pure

aesthetics: Black bodies occupying spaces of serenity, asserting quiet

joy as both inheritance and birthright.

Technically, the artist handles light as one might sculpt memory. The

glow does not seem to come from an external source, but to emanate

from the bodies and objects themselves, creating a vibration that moves

across the canvas. Blue and purple are not passive backgrounds; they

are living substance — the very oxygen his figures breathe.

Emmanuel Gillespie ultimately offers us a cartography of affection. His painting suggests that the

sacred does not dwell in the extraordinary, but resides in the stillness of an ordinary moment —

when we feel safe enough to lower our guard.

When contemplating these “radiant blues,” the question that arises is not what the figures are

doing, but what they are feeling. And, by extension, what we — in the voracity of our days — have

stopped allowing ourselves to feel.

Gillespie invites us to pause. And in that blue-tinged silence, to discover that love is, above all, a

form of presence.

Emmanuel Gillespie ultimately offers us a cartography of affection. His painting suggests that the

sacred does not dwell in the extraordinary, but resides in the stillness of an ordinary moment —

when we feel safe enough to lower our guard.

When contemplating these “radiant blues,” the question that arises is not what the figures are

doing, but what they are feeling. And, by extension, what we — in the voracity of our days — have

stopped allowing ourselves to feel.

Gillespie invites us to pause. And in that blue-tinged silence, to discover that love is, above all, a

form of presence.

The Silence Blue

Summons

The Silence Blue

Summons

Anke Ryba

In Anke Ryba’s work, blue is not merely a chromatic choice; it is an atmospheric

condition. Entering her canvases means accepting a renegotiation of gravity, where the

flat surface dissolves into vertiginous depth. In this Code Blue edition, the German artist

does not present color as an adjective of landscape, but as a noun in its own right — a

living, breathable entity that dilates the pupil and oxygenates thought. Anke does not

illustrate infinity; she summons it.

When she states that blue expands her “inner perception,” the artist offers us the key to

understanding her abstraction: her works are maps of submerged territories. She

commands the liquidity of paint with a gesture that oscillates between the fury of a

storm and the stillness of the abyss.

There is no rigidity here. The forms on her canvases appear captured mid-drift or mid-

explosion. White cuts through cobalt, and indigo emerges not as external light but as

bioluminescence — a glow emanating from within the pictorial matter itself. It is the

“vitality” the artist pursues: a painting that does not stagnate but flows, mirroring the

perpetual mutability of oceans and memory.

A fascinating paradox defines Anke’s work: the more abstract the form, the sharper the

sensation. “The blue in my paintings makes me feel so open,” she says. That openness

translates into compositions where visceral force coexists with quiet harmony.

In a noisy world, the clarity Anke finds in the creative process functions like a tuning fork,

aligning the viewer’s frequency. When black appears, it is not the negation of light but a

necessary depth — an anchor preventing us from drifting too far into ethereal vastness.

It is an “infinite creativity that tells stories” without words, narrating the universal journey

toward balance within a complex cosmos.

“For me, as an artist, the color blue plays a central role. Through its association with

the sky and the ocean, blue expands my inner perception and my memories. My

mind focuses on breadth and depth, leading me into an inner space of vitality.”

Anke Ryba