Why Blue Feels Like a Threshold Rather Than a Colour
Blue is often described as calm or serene, but in the symbolic and mythological world it acts more like a threshold. It is the colour that separates one realm from another: water from air, waking from dreaming, the everyday from the sacred. When I use blue in my artwork, I’m tapping into this ancient sense of passage. In many traditions, blue was a colour of protection, worn as a charm or painted on doorways to guard against unwanted spirits. Yet it was also the colour of longing, of distance, of looking beyond what the eye can reach. This dual nature makes blue one of the most emotionally charged hues in my palette.
Water as a Mirror of the Unconscious
Water has always been treated as the original mirror—the surface where the soul sees itself reflected. In Slavic and Baltic folklore, lakes and rivers were believed to hold the memories of the world, storing dreams and ancestral whispers beneath their depth. Blue became the colour of those hidden archives. When I paint botanical shapes submerged in soft blues or let petals melt into watery gradients, I’m reaching toward that idea of emotional memory. Blue carries a fluid logic—one that mirrors the unconscious. It reveals in ripples, not in declarations, and I rely on that softness when creating scenes that feel intuitive rather than literal.
The Sky as a Realm of Divine Distance
While water pulls inward, the sky reaches outward. Blue sky has long represented divine separation, the space where gods, spirits or celestial beings dwell. In ancient belief systems, the sky wasn’t empty; it was populated, attentive, and sometimes judgmental. Blue as sky-colour became a protective veil, a spiritual dome. I find that when I introduce soft sky-blues into my work—through glowing petals, misty gradients or floating shapes—the composition suddenly feels watched by something vast. It brings a sense of perspective, a reminder that not everything visible exists on the ground. Blue becomes a silent guardian, both distant and deeply present.
Blue as the Colour of Intuition
Psychologically, blue is associated with clarity, but intuitive clarity is rarely sharp. It is a slow recognition, a quiet inner shift, the moment when something makes sense before it can be explained. Blue, in my art, embodies this kind of inner listening. It softens the edges of forms, making space for ambiguity and doubt. It creates rooms of stillness inside the image. When viewers respond to my blue compositions, they often describe feeling introspective or strangely understood. That reaction fascinates me because it mirrors how intuition feels—subtle, diffuse, and deeply personal.
Blue as Divine Protection
Across multiple cultures, blue has been the colour of protection. Amulets in shades of blue were believed to ward off malice, from Nazar beads to painted icons. Blue threads were woven into garments to protect children. Doorframes in Mediterranean villages were once painted blue to distract or repel wandering spirits. This protective function enters my work instinctively. When I place a deep blue core inside a surreal bloom or frame botanical forms with a blue halo, it feels like creating a small sanctuary inside the artwork—a symbolic shelter where emotion can unfold safely.
The Dream Portal: Blue as Entry to the Imaginal
Blue has a long association with dreams, visions and altered states. Many dream codices describe blue environments as places where meaning shifts shape or where the dreamer encounters guidance. In fairy tales, blue flowers appear as markers of fate or as guides toward hidden truths. In esoteric traditions, blue light is the colour of astral travel or lucid dreaming.
When I paint blue petals that appear to glow or distort, I’m leaning into that dream-logic. Blue becomes a portal rather than pigment. The viewer steps through it emotionally, entering a space that obeys different rules. It is not surrealism for its own sake; it is symbolic dream architecture.
Blue and the Texture of Emotional Reflection
Reflection is not always peaceful. Sometimes it is a confrontation with what the water reveals. Sometimes it is blue because the truth is difficult to touch. Texture helps carry that emotional quality in my work. Grain makes blue feel weathered, as if memory itself were textured. Soft noise adds emotional turbulence. Smooth gradients create the illusion of breath or tide.
Through texture, blue becomes a mood rather than a hue. It behaves like inner weather, shifting between quiet clarity and storm-like opacity.
Botanical Magic Through the Blue Lens
When flowers appear in blue, they lose their connection to the earth and move closer to myth. Blue botanicals exist rarely in nature, which makes them symbolically potent. In Slavic lore, a blue flower could reveal one’s destiny or break an enchantment. In Celtic tales, blue blossoms grew only in places touched by the Otherworld.
My blue florals echo that sense of impossibility. They feel slightly unearthly, less like plants and more like spiritual messengers. Their glow, their distortion, their suspended shapes all contribute to the impression that they are communicating rather than decorating. Blue turns the floral form into an omen of emotional movement.
The Soul of Intuition
Ultimately, blue in my artwork becomes the colour of the intuitive soul. It holds the memory of water, the breath of the sky, the pulse of protection and the doorway to dreams. It is a colour that looks outward and inward simultaneously.
When viewers step into a blue-dominant piece, I hope they feel something shift—a quiet awareness, a mirrored emotion, a sense of being invited into their own depth.
In this way, blue becomes more than colour. It becomes guidance.
