Love Letters in Crayon: Blue-Green
The unlikely color that breathed new life into our future homeworld.
Every Friday afternoon, “64 to Infinity: Love Letters in Crayon” will illustrate the long, strange story of humankind in one of the 64 colors that make up this world-famous primary palette. After admiring one of the newest shades of human ingenuity in Bluetiful last week, we look back on the unlikely event that animated our planet and trace our shared story forward to the present using the Blue-Green crayon.
As a color with undeniably nautical associations, it is only appropriate that Blue Green offers great depth to the interested observer.
In fact, this particular shade is considered so profound in cultures worldwide that many draw limited or no firm distinction between Blue and Green for shade classification purposes.
A number of languages throughout Asia make use of a single character to describe either element of Blue Green, and examples of Classical Arabic poetry exist which make romantic reference to the sky of our planet as "The Green."
The history of Blue Green in human handcraft dates back centuries, perhaps most notably in the traditional Chinese ink painting style Shan Shui. The Shan Shui æsthetic--translating literally as "mountain-water"--follows a set of carefully devised principles for composition and form.
The ornate style typically incorporates flowing organic line work for exceptional visual texture and a meandering path leading to a defined focal point. As it relates directly to Blue Green, the component colors are seen to represent water and wood respectively, a positive connection that encourages the combined use of these tones for Shan Shui works. However, the shade we now know as Blue Green flows into the story of Earth far before the Chinese dynastic era.
Blue Green recalls the color of cyanobacteria, believed to have developed in the Global Ocean nearly 2.5 billion years ago. Cyanobacteria played an indispensable role in creating the world we see today, becoming the first forms of life to use photosynthesis as a food source and incidentally adding great quantities of oxygen to the atmosphere of a young, chaotic world.
This most fortunate phenomenon has been identified by the scientific community as the Great Oxygenation Event that ever so slowly made Earth into a hospitable environment for The Species' eventual development.
We simply could not have lived without the miraculous appearance of Blue Green on The Planet, and now you see why I am obsessed with this color.
If Blue Green can tell a story about the history of our world, our next crayon may be able to draw a few compelling conclusions about our present..and perhaps, our future? Find out next Friday as we explore the unexpected magic of Blue Violet!
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