THREAD

It is roughly the mid 1400s. You stand in the harbour and the ship finally arrives from the East (modern-day Afghanistan to be more precise). You soon hold in your hands your semi-precious and very expensive stone. As a person of your time and culture, for you the East is a special place, the symbol of paradise. This stone is only found there and has been mined much the same way for thousands of years. It is believed to have special powers and it is used as a jewel and in medicine. It is the gem of gems. It is lapis lazuli.

You are an artist and you have been commissioned to work on an illuminated manuscript. You paint images onto manuscripts and your paint is extracted from minerals that give different colours. Lapis lazuli is the stone that gives you that rich, stunning blue. Lapis lazuli consists of a gold, white-blue mineral and in order to extract the ultramarine for your manuscript, you need to separate the three minerals. But first you must atone for your sin because it is believed that humans should not separate what God has joined. What has this got to do with our topic? Keep pulling… So you atone, separate, and set to work. The colour is considered so sacred it is used only to depict religious figures.* Unbeknownst to you there will soon come an Italian called Tiziano who will break with tradition and scandalously paint skies and much else with this ultramarine. Centuries later will come a group of Impressionist painters who will use blue in various ways, a certain Pablo Picasso will even have a ‘blue period’. A 20th century Yves Klein will go so far as to patent a variant of ultramarine blue, his International Klein Blue which he believes to be the closest to representing space and eternity itself. Further down the line Vogue Italia would tell you that one of the colours of the 2018/19 season is digital blue.

“Don’t pull on a thread or it will all come undone!” How many times have you heard that before?! When you happen to jag your sweater on a sharp edge and a little thread pops out… To pull or not to pull, that is the question. But what if you did pull on the thread? Well if the colour blue were a thread you pulled on in a sweater, that is part of what you would discover as it unraveled before you. The blue you see on that billboard or in your favourite blazer has a history, a context; it is a thread that, should you pull on it, will reveals its history, complexity and beauty.

A few years ago I had a lecture about how a particular thread of Greek thought was woven into Jewish thinking from the time of the Babylonian captivity (mid 1st millennium B.C.) until the present day. I showed how certain ideas were woven into questions, argumentation, answers and discoveries made over the centuries, and what a difference following such a thread makes in our understanding of the development of ideas. Why is all this with lapis lazuli important? Not simply because it is a fascinating aspect of art history, but because everything has context. Every idea is a thread that has its roots, trajectory and history. Everything you are wearing and that surrounds you as you look around is a thread of sorts. I tell my students that many aspects of modern life are but threads that if one pulled on them, one would often discover ancient roots. Why is Superman called Superman? Why are Mad Hatters mad? Why are there 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute? Why do we say ‘count your lucky stars’? I could go on. Threads are everywhere we look.

Our daily lives are but threads that are connected to much deeper and broader stories of human experience. We, too, have our ‘art history’, the threads that have woven us to be who we are in this moment. What threads have gone into weaving you, your story?

There are connections in our lives – events, conversations, images, observations, insights, memories – that like threads in a tapestry form a whole. But sometimes we cannot see the whole, it is too large, too overwhelming, too obscure. On the other hand, a thread is easier to follow. What would happen if you began to pull on a particular thread in your life and see what it revealed? How might that bigger picture inform your present and shape your future? What if, rather than see fragmentation, disconnectedness and randomness in your life, you could see more sense, coherence and meaning?

There is a time and place when it is undoubtedly wise not to pull on the thread. But there are also times when the wise choice is to do the exact opposite. Why not pull on that thread you have been eyeing and simply see what unfolds? Why not redefine what it means to pull on a thread and have it all come ‘undone’? Who knows what you might discover.

*See for example the Wilton Diptych (c. 1395-9) in which Mary is clad in a very blue dress (from lapis lazuli), while her maidens are in less ‘pure’ versions of blue that appear to be azurite or ultramarine ash.

**For more information on the colour blue and its history, feel free to contact Dr Georgia Panteli who is very passionate about the subject!

You might also enjoy more on Pablo Picasso.

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