Paris Lovers Blue — Capturing Colour

There are days in Paris, in late April or early May, when the sky turns an impossibly saturated blue — not the pale grey of winter or the hazy white of summer heat, but a blue so confident it feels like pigment pressed straight from the tube.

This is an essay about that colour, and about the long human obsession with capturing it. Ultramarine, the blue in Bellini’s Virgin Mary, travelled from the lapis lazuli mines of Badakhshan in Afghanistan across Persia and the Levant to reach a painter’s workshop in Florence — and it cost more than gold by weight. Yves Klein spent years tweaking synthetic ultramarine to create his International Klein Blue, then declared the entire sky his artwork. Anish Kapoor acquired exclusive artistic rights to Vantablack, the blackest black. Colour, it turns out, has always been fought over.

In response to all of them, I hereby propose “Paris Lovers Blue” — the precise saturation of the sky above Parisian park lawns on the first warm Saturday in May. I am offering it free of charge to all artists. Anish Kapoor is welcome to it too.

Read the full essay and see the gouache paintings on Substack →