Dreaming of Blue

Green will always be my favorite color. You just can't trade colors midway through your life. But I feel the pull of blue. I have worked on an art project with children this September and have studied the various shades of blue. How hard it was for us to attain turquoise!

My sister has the bluest eyes, as U2 would sing. My nephews, her sons, have different hues of blue scattered in their big green eyes. My youngest son will ALWAYS opt for light blue when coloring. Don't children tell you they love you as much as the sky or the sea, which are blue.

Lately, I have spotted blue everywhere: in the illuminated swimming complex in the middle of the desert, in a lone blue fisherman boat on the beach and especially in Art! Have I not pondered the blues of Picasso to sound cliche, the single precious Blue of Yves Klein, the various shades of blue of Farhadian and the signature blue of Youssef Nabil? My fascination with blue thrives on my conviction that Chris Martin serenades me personally when he sings "the sky is blue!"

I will never forget a painting of tiger and hunter by MF Hussein at the AbuDhabi fair a couple of years ago. This year, at the same fair, I had another love at first sight experience with a work of art, that I will never forget.

My husband may say that there are as many Damien Hirst butterfly compositions as there are polka dot paintings by the same artist. He may denounce the fact that hundreds of assistants scurry in his atelier to produce these works and I don't care. I beg to differ. I still believe in the pop effect of the polka dots and the magical feel of collaged butterflies.

I visited a superb Damien Hirst show in Monaco last summer and what impressed me more than the preserved shark, the accumulated diamonds, the beloved polka dots, the medicine cabinets and the blinged skulls, were the butterflies!!!!! He has made the subject of a doodle, the most basic feminine artistic cliche, the butterfly, a precious artistic subject!

I have visited a few live butterflyramas, humid and tropical green houses with a flurry of various butterflies. In my father's Mediterranean garden, I catch butterflies with my eyes like scattered opportunities that nest in flowers.

But I cannot imagine how Damien Hirst finds the largest collection of blue butterflies, how he delicately cuts them, matches them and creates a large circular kaleidoscope for me to discover.

As soon as I caught a glimpse of the butterflies at AbuDhabi, I zoomed closer, attracted by its beauty, its familiar signature, its stained glass quality. I urged my father to take a picture of me for memories sake, like a fan does with her favorite pop star. I came back to it again and again during my short visit to the fair, attempting to memorize the poetry of entomology.


"I will dream of blue
Butterflies in the white of
Snow"
These free verse were composed once upon a dream of Damien Hirst butterflies