Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour

The sea, the sky, the veins of your hands, the earth itself when photographed from space…blue sometimes seems to overwhelm all the other shades of our world in its all-encompassing presence. The blues of Blue Mythologies include those present in the world’s religions, a robin’s egg, science, slavery, gender, sex, art, literature and contemporary film. Carol Mavor’s engaging and elegiac readings in this beautifully illustrated book are at once sociological, literary, historical and visual, taking the reader from the blue of a newborn baby’s eyes to Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and from the films of Derek Jarman and Krzysztof Kieslowski to the islands of Venice and Aran.

In Blue Mythologies Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture, giving us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales and connotations of those somethings blue.

‘Blue, in Mavor’s vertiginous essay, is not so much an object of art-historical analysis as an energy or atmosphere, the very mood in which [Mavor] thinks and writes.’ - Brian Dillon

‘Mavor is at her somersaulting best, moving effortlessly between disciplines.’ - Los Angeles Review of Books