Word: blueness
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Taking in the wood-paneled walls, Remele paused. He respected these six sisters not only for the brownness of their coats but also the blueness of their blood...
Before we understood Rayleigh scattering, there was no scientifically satisfactory explanation for the sky's blueness. The idea that the sky is blue because God wants it to be blue existed before scientists came to understand Rayleigh scattering, and it continues to exist today, not in the least undermined by our advance in scientific understanding. The religious explanation has been supplemented--but not supplanted--by advances in scientific knowledge. We now may, if we care to, think of Rayleigh scattering as the method God has chosen to implement his color scheme...
...generation of scientists, you don't draw a box around all our scientific understanding to date and say, "Everything outside this box we can explain only by invoking God's will." Back in 1855, no one told the future Lord Rayleigh that the scientific reason for the sky's blueness is that God wants it that way. Or if someone did tell him that, we can all be happy that the youth was plucky enough to ignore them. For science, intelligent design is a dead-end idea...
...monumental canvas invites you to stare until your soul merges with its utter blueness. Barnett Newman painted Ulysses in 1952, after the failure of his first two solo shows. But instead of making his art more accessible - his paintings had been criticized as "nearly blank" - he traveled farther into abstraction. Ulysses and its companions, the inkier Day Before One (1951) and the sable Prometheus Bound (1952), strike the viewer with the primeval and inexplicable force of Stonehenge monoliths. These works need to be seen to be believed. "There is no substitute for the personal experience of these paintings," says...
These apart, perhaps the most beautiful evocation of Provence in Cezanne's work is a seascape, The Gulf of Marseille Seen from L'Estaque, circa 1886. A blue bay, with blue hills on the horizon and a pale, scrubbed blue sky; a pier running into the blueness on the upper left, reaching (it seems) toward a white scarf of smoke coming from a chimney in the right foreground and binding the whole space between; below, the faceted blocks of houses and the lovely staccato rhythm of chimneys. It radiates peace and balance and, above all, easefulness--the sense of being...