Finding My Way Back to Ultramarine Blue

My curiosity about the history of color began with a book someone forgot at a barbershop.

It was 2012. I had graduated from Texas State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, moved back to Austin, and was working as a receptionist at a barber shop. A client left behind Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette. Nobody at the shop seemed interested in it, so I took it home.

For about a week, I read whenever I had spare time. I made it halfway through before the client called asking whether they had left their book there. Of course I said yes and returned it. A perfectly reasonable end to an arrangement I had hoped would last a little longer.

By then, something had already changed for me. I knew how to work with color, but I was beginning to think about what had happened to it before it ever reached my hands. There were places inside those pigments. There was labor, trade, devotion, and somebody deciding that a particular shade was worth going to extraordinary lengths to obtain.

I started paying attention to the choices behind the colors. Why that blue on that figure? Why give it so much space? What did it mean to the person painting it, and to the person who would stand before it?

Ultramarine keeps bringing me back to those questions. The darkest passages pull me in first. I want to get closer and see how deep the blue actually goes. Then my attention moves toward the lighter areas and the feeling changes. It comes in layers, like a rich dish or a good scent. There is the immediate attraction, the body of it, and something that stays with me afterward.

It can feel calming, spiritual, sensual, even a little grand. What surprises me is how many personalities one color can hold without losing itself.

For a while, though, painting entirely in blue carried one particular association for me. Returning to ultramarine through my Blue Island series raised a more personal question. Can making with a color again change the power of the memory attached to it?

A blue I knew before I could name it

When I try to explain my attachment to blue, the image that comes to mind most clearly is the Virgin Mary’s veil.

I remember a white statue being brought to my grandmother’s house. It was meant to stand among the roses in her front yard in memory of my tío. My grandmother wanted it painted in color, and I watched my tía do it.

The act of painting the veil blue is what remains clearest. I remember the belly of the brush loaded with pigment, the bristles fanning with pressure, and the blue appearing across the white figure. I remember metallic gold stars against it.

I do not know what pigment she used. This memory belongs to the color as I saw it, long before I thought to read a label. Someone in my family was making something beautiful for someone we loved. I did not need an explanation of religious symbolism to feel what the gesture carried.

It was also one of my earliest encounters with art made in response to death, although I did not yet have the phrase memento mori for it.

Years later, looking at photographs of Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, I recognized something familiar. Painted between 1303 and 1305, its frescoes rise beneath a blue vaulted ceiling scattered with golden stars.

I imagine people entering that space for the first time and looking up. What must it have felt like to see a sea of blue overhead? The commitment moves me. Giotto gave the color enough room to become an atmosphere. A person could walk into the chapel and stand beneath a painted heaven on earth.

Giotto, interior of the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, c. 1303–1305.

And there, in a building from the fourteenth century, I see something that returns me to my grandmother’s front yard. Those stars. That blue. My tía’s hands.

The history of ultramarine gives another dimension to that feeling. For centuries, its most prized natural form came from lapis lazuli mined in Badakhshan, in present-day Afghanistan. The stone had to be taken from the earth, transported, ground, and painstakingly processed before its blue could enter a painting.

Lapis contains several minerals. Lazurite gives it blue, calcite can leave pale veins, and pyrite appears as small golden flecks. Producing a fine pigment required separating what the painter wanted from everything else. It was far more involved than crushing a stone. Natural ultramarine became one of the most costly materials on a painter’s palette.

I still wonder what possessed the first person to take on that task. Curiosity? Obsession? A higher calling?

Its name carries the distance with it. Ultramarine means “beyond the sea.” I love knowing that, particularly now, when large bodies of water separate so many of the places that have shaped me.

In European religious painting, the beauty and expense of ultramarine made it a material worthy of Mary’s mantle. Its use could express reverence while also revealing the resources of the person commissioning the work. Faith and wealth could meet in the same fold of cloth.

I am interested in that history, but what stays closest to me is the gesture of care. A painter choosing a precious blue for a beloved figure. My tía painting a statue for our family. The circumstances are different, yet I understand the desire to give something your full attention because it matters to you.

When a Color Holds a Memory

Years ago in Bali, I painted two skull paintings surrounded by tropical flowers. The flowers came from the beauty around me. The skull was a disguised self portrait.

I was living in a beautiful place while moving through a difficult private season. That contradiction was part of what made the experience hard to explain. I could see the nature around me. I knew it was beautiful. But knowing something is beautiful and being able to receive that beauty are very different things.

The paintings gave the feeling a form. At the time, two paintings was all I could manage.

Every time I looked at them afterward, the color returned me to that period. Eventually, I felt as though I had done something unfair to blue itself. I know how that sounds. Blue is a pigment. It was not waiting for an apology. Still, this beautiful and historically powerful color had become tied to one painful association in my own work.

The paintings had been honest, and I do not regret its honesty. I simply did not want that experience to determine everything I would feel about ultramarine. There had been a blue veil before there was a blue skulls. I wanted to know what could come after it.

Staying With the Color

On Kauaʻi, the answer began to appear through the work itself.

I started making small studies on paper. Even preparing the ground became something I looked forward to. I pushed molding paste with a palette knife, mixed in white, deepened passages with ultramarine, and watched each surface take on a different character.

Primer, extenders, retarder, and even the temperature in the room change the way the paint behaves. Some mixtures move easily. Others hold every mark. A raised edge catches the light, and the same blue looks different again once it dries.

I became interested in the moments when the material did something I had not anticipated. I would place another sheet of paper on the table, change the ground, or give a shape more space. I did not begin with a formal theory. I had paint, paper, repetition, and a growing sense that the color had more to show me.

That was when the studies began becoming Blue Island. Ultramarine was showing too many personalities for a single painting.

There is also a practical freedom in being able to use this much of it. A process for manufacturing synthetic ultramarine was made public in France in 1828, helping turn a once rare material into an accessible modern pigment. The blue on my table is synthetic ultramarine labeled PB29. I can pour it out, mix it, and make a study that may or may not work.

I think about that freedom when I look at Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome from 1961. Klein gave an entire surface to blue. There is no figure, flower, or landscape explaining why we should keep looking. Working with a chemist, he developed a binding medium that preserved the intensity he wanted from the dry ultramarine pigment.

That takes nerve. I admire the confidence of giving one color that much responsibility. I also love that people have continued to give it their attention.

Giotto’s chapel and Klein’s monochrome have become two anchors for me. One uses blue to build a sacred world around the viewer. The other asks the color to stand on its own. Together, they make me think about how much space I am willing to give blue in my work and how long I am willing to stay with it.

I will admit that placing myself anywhere inside this long history strokes my ego a little. Of course it does. I have devoted much of my life to making art. It is exciting to feel a connection between what is happening at my table and what other painters have asked of this color across centuries.

But the painting still has to happen one decision at a time.

In a monochromatic work, every shift becomes visible. A lighter blue makes the neighboring dark feel deeper. I can ask ultramarine to do work I might otherwise assign to black, keeping the depth inside the hue. I love seeing how much difference can exist inside one color and still feel harmonious.

The honu has been a particular pleasure to watch emerge. As its face and body become present, I get that small rush of seeing something come to life.

Ultramarine honu painting in progress from my Blue Island series, Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi, 2026.

It is funny how much joy turtles bring into my life, mostly because I wonder why I, like so many others, find them so endearing. If you really look at their faces, they are strange and almost alien. With a different temperament, I think we would be terrified of them. Instead, they move through the water with an unhurried grace. They are weightless, prehistoric living rocks floating effortlessly through the sea. True living dinosaurs among our mortal souls.

When I watch one, time seems to enter a slow moving vortex. My mind and body become very still, as though blinking might make me miss something, even though the turtle is doing very little beyond existing. Perhaps that is part of the attraction. Our hurried human bodies recognize something in their long history and want to borrow a little of that calm.

After my fourth hibiscus tho, I was getting bored. The orchid brought my attention back. Then I painted a pearl inside an oyster.

Blue Island oyster and orchid studies, acrylic on paper, Kauaʻi, 2026.

When I placed the orchid and oyster beside each other, something in the work became clearer. The series was no longer only about what ultramarine could do technically. It was also becoming a language for the body, devotion, and care.

The Body Inside the Shell

The oyster introduced a more sensual form into the series. Its shape carries associations with female anatomy, but also with protection, appetite, and transformation. I can recognize my body in the shell and want to paint that recognition with care.

Pearl Oyster study from Blue Island, acrylic on paper, Kauaʻi, 2026.

Living in Bali and later in Dubai made me more conscious that the freedom to represent the body and speak publicly about desire is not shared equally. Laws, customs, family expectations, and social consequences shape what some women and artists can safely show.

I do not want to flatten entire cultures or assume that modesty is a form of oppression. Modesty can be personal, chosen, and sacred. Choice is the point. There is a difference between choosing privacy and knowing that stepping outside it could place your safety, livelihood, or freedom at risk.

That awareness changed how I understood my own position. To paint an oyster that reminds me of the female body, call it sensual and beautiful, and place it publicly under my own name is a freedom I do not take for granted. The work does not need to be explicit to insist that a woman’s body belongs to her. Pleasure does not have to be shameful. Femininity can be sacred without being sanitized.

The blue allows those feelings to live together. It can carry the sensual and the spiritual without forcing me to choose between them.

The pearl adds another layer. While learning more about fine jewelry in Hawaiʻi, I have become interested in South Sea, Tahitian, Akoya, and freshwater pearls. Their value may reflect rarity and quality, but that does not explain the whole attraction. People often take their time until a particular pearl feels like theirs. I recognize that response from the way someone may stand before a painting and feel claimed by it.

South Sea baroque pearl strands in luminous white, gold, and charcoal tones, love the irregular beauty of its formation.

A pearl is formed inside a living mollusk. That fact will forever amaze me. Lapis begins as stone. A pearl has a biological origin. Both are transformed into objects that people assign value to and choose to carry close to the body.

The oyster became the painting I was most interested in making. When I compare it with the skull from Bali, I can see that the meaning of blue has widened. One painting gave form to a difficult period. The other allowed me to recognize myself in something I wanted to celebrate.

This was the change I had been looking for. I did not need to erase the earlier association. I needed to give it company.

The View From Here

Blue Island was conceived on Kauaʻi, but the word island carries more than the location of my studio. An island has boundaries. It can feel isolated, protected, exposed, or completely sufficient, depending on the day.

Kauaʻi is so lush and hilly that I sometimes forget I am surrounded by ocean. Then the road rises as I drive from one town to another, and there it is beyond the green. A glimpse of blue through a valley or over the trees. It catches my attention every time.

As I write this in September 2026, Kauaʻi is recovering from Hurricane Lowell. The storm brought damaging winds, widespread power outages, downed trees, and blocked roads. Our power went out, and the ordinary structure of the day disappeared with it.

Some of the trees outside my main window were damaged and later cleared. I miss them. They had been part of the view I knew.

Morning light through my window on Kauaʻi after Hurricane Lowell, September 2026.

Now I can see more sky from that window than I ever expected. Clouds pass across a rich blue, and I find myself getting lost in it. I am glad I can see it. I still wish the trees were there.

That is where these paintings are being made. The view has changed, the island is recovering, and the work is still teaching me how much one color can hold.

What the Color Can Hold

When I began Blue Island, I thought I owed ultramarine a happier painting. The work corrected me. A color does not need redemption. It needs room.

The skull among flowers remains true. It recorded something I could not express any other way at the time. But it no longer has exclusive claim over every blue that comes after it. The honu, hibiscus, orchid, oyster, and pearl have each added another meaning.

Works in progress from my Blue Island series, created on Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi, 2026.

That may be one of art’s most practical forms of healing. It does not change what happened or force an old association to disappear. It lets us stay with an image, material, or color long enough to receive new information from it. Memory is still present, but it is no longer speaking alone.

If a color or image keeps returning, perhaps the first task is not to decide what it means. Pay attention to what it carries. Make something with it. Then make another. Meaning may arrive through repetition rather than explanation.

The first time I painted in blue, I was giving a difficult feeling somewhere to go. This time, I am giving the color more room than that feeling ever had.

Ultramarine did not need a second chance. I needed to return to it long enough to understand that one memory did not own it.

 

 

 

 

Research sources

National Gallery on lapis lazuli and natural ultramarine
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/39-the-wilton-diptych-39-ultramarine-the-national-gallery-london/zAXh8ZSniJOqhA

GIA on the composition and history of lapis lazuli
https://www.gia.edu/lapis-lazuli

Scrovegni Chapel imaging project on Giotto and the starry vault
https://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/news-and-media/news/the-scrovegni-chapel-a-360-view-of-giottos-masterpiece/

MoMA collection record for Yves Klein Blue Monochrome 1961
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80103

Centre Pompidou on the development of International Klein Blue
https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/pompidou-plus/magazine/article/the-untold-story-of-the-international-klein-blue-ikb-of-yves-klein

GIA on natural and cultured pearls
https://www.gia.edu/pearl

County of Kauaʻi on Hurricane Lowell damage and outages, September 8, 2026
https://www.kauai.gov/County-Press-Releases/730-a.m.-Sept.-8-County-of-Kaua%CA%BBi-Hurricane-Lowell-Update-2026

Kauaʻi Island Utility Cooperative outage figures reported by America’s Electric Cooperatives
https://www.electric.coop/hurricane-lowell-knocks-out-power-to-most-kauai-co-op-members