"What hurts you blesses you / Darkness is your candle" (Rumi)
In the end it's all a matter of light
Think if you can keep hold of the imprint from the sun and the energy of a particular day or a special moment from a trip, from a place you visited.
Think about photographs that are really “written with light,” which is what the original Greek words (phos/photo + grapho) mean.
For me, the color blue, like Vitamin D, is a revitalizing drug; it connects me with nature, and with light, it’s my “Vitamin blue.”
·In the technique of cyanoprinting, just like photosynthesis, the sun does not simply illuminate, it transforms – the intensity of the sun’s rays and time of exposure of an object (a photogram) or an image (photograph processed with a special technique) to the sunlight (or to some other source of ultraviolet radiation) determines the shape and intensity of the tones in the final product. The intensity of the blue in the final result is a product of the length of time it is exposed to sunlight.
·In reality, each cyanoprint or blueprint is a code that contains information about the exact time and place where it was created (as you can see here).
·In the second phase, specific techniques, such as, for example, rinsing with hydrogen peroxide, oxalic acid, ammonia, black tea, coffee, or other liquids, as well as the addition of special protective varnishes after drying, offer the possibility of intensifying or dulling the color of the final result.
·In the lab, apart from the unconventional technique of cyanoprinting, I experiment with other unusual techniques of printing using sunlight, such as sketching with organic materials and printing with solar dyes.
"Vitamin Blue"
Years ago, when I was learning to dive – I wanted back then to work in underwater archaeology – I learned that below a certain depth, colors stop being visible to the human eye, and everything is the same dark blue.
“Every problem that you encounter in the deep must be solved in the deep,” our instructor used to tell us. If a diver becomes frightened or panics and rushes to the surface without making the necessary pauses to depressurize, they risk incurring the diver’s disease, the bends, which can kill or cripple you.
·It is the same with problems of a mental or emotional nature; much better to solve them in the deep, to look them “in the eye” and “expose them to the light.”
During a time of deep dives into the middle depth, I discovered cyanoprinting.
·Blue is one of the three primary colors, along with red and yellow. In the chromatic phase, it lies between 450 and 495 nanometres (nm).
·In some cultures, it is thought to be the most “protective” color – in the Middle East, for example, doors are painted blue to prevent evil spirits from entering the house, while in the American Southwest, people paint the floors of the verandahs blue to keep ghosts away.
In the visible world, blue comes in countless shades (from dark blue, blue-black to pale blue), and if generally it has been connected in Western society with melancholy (a case of the “blues”), blue is much much more for us Greeks: It is the blue of the Attica sky, the Aegean Sea (nowhere else on earth is the sea as blue as it is in the Mediterranean), our first notebooks at school are blue, as were our school uniforms in the past. I also think that it is the foremost color of Memory – an invigorating and nostalgic energy that connects us to the light.
·In the Οut of the Βlues collection that emerged from this personally difficult period, I explore the feelings that the color blue gave birth to through images from my photo archive.
I am learning to love every shade of the color blue.
