The blue sky

The hardest part of any puzzle is the endless blue sky. An undefinable, endless mass of colour with no visual punctuation that makes it easy to put pieces together. I always left these pieces to last. With the outside frame set – the easier part because one of the sides would be perfectly straight – the only thing left would be a pile of blue pieces with haphazard interlocking contours. Taking on the ‘sky’ part of the puzzle is the most demanding as you would spend hours and hours just to create a flat blue with no features. A mindless task, it might seem, but a lot of labour goes into the creation of the simple plane of colour.

This endless blue seems to portray a constructed nothingness.

Two forty foot high doric columns stretch into the sky at the northern entrance to Chicago’s Cancer survivors garden in Grant Park near the Institute of Art in the city. The pillars were salvaged from a 1905 Chicago federal building and create one of the city’s more obscure upward elevations. However, unlike the gargantuan skyscrapers that surround it the columns look as if they should support something. You construct something in its absence, and the columns are more likely to stay in the mind than if they were in situ, much in the same way a painting given huge white space in a gallery attracts more attention than a wall frame-to-frame with paintings.

Seems to be a thing in the States recently, look at the National Capitol Columns – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Capitol_Columns.