Chartres Bleu versus Uckermark Blau

Joan Didion, Maggie Nelson, Blue de Notre Dame

Joan Didion compares in her book ‘Blue Nights’ the evening blue with ‘Le Blue de Notre Dame de Chartres’. Maggie Nelson is also immediately aware in her ‘Bluets’ that she cannot write about blue without planning a trip to Chartres. Nelson never got there. ‘That will not happen to me,’ I thought in the autumn of 2021. And so I went.

But first I made a Blue de Chartres myself.

Uckermark Blau

During my residency in Libken, I thought more and more about this Chartres Blue while looking at the blue colour my windows took on every morning and every evening during the blue hour. Don’t I actually have a Chartres Blue here at my window? Every day, again, and even twice a day?

I don’t need coloured glass at all, I thought. The glass tints itself by the blue luminous glow. Every blue hour the glass colours pure blue.

With dried leaves from the surroundings of Libken and Böckenberg, I made patterns and motifs on the windows in the exhibition space on the Libken site. This building is called the ‘Wasserwerk’ and consists on one side entirely of windows.

The colours of the leaves, golden brown, brown-red, sunset yellow, and yellowgreen, played with the rising and fading blue in their interspaces.

The typical Chartres Blue shone over the German countryside. Complete, 100% natural, luminous, radiant blue.

La Notre dame and me, we met

A month later we actually drove to Chartres in France. The grandeur of the blue windows, the height and depth of the blue, it is truly a proud blue. It was a beautiful meeting between Le Blue de Notre Dame and me. We will surely see each other again.