During the Summer of 2015 I took a series of photo's around my backyard with a creative origin in a penetrating melancholy mood I was feeling at the time. I posted them during the initial release of the gallery, but just as a photoset, unexplained, free for the viewers interpretation. Even though I am an advocate and user of that practice, in revision, I decided to explain these photo's because I still enjoy them in the same spirit today as I did during the time of this series. Also, in light of Spring's Blue Phase beginning, I thought it'd be appropriate. I even made a short film to accompany the set that I didn't add on the site, but you can view it all below and chime in where you see fit.
The Melancholy Blue Boy or Cobalt Huey is centered around the idea of an individualistic man living comfortably in his solitude and finding joy where he's most comfortable, in himself. This first photo duplicating himself into four, smaller divisions of himself is suggestive of a multitude of self's that he's not yet developed in their own entirety.
Interacting with his surroundings, Huey brings himself into his own conversation about loneliness, suppression (as reflected in the film), and life work. Symbolically, the Pantone color strip represents a faint and new involvement in what already exists. Reaching and touching the multiple year old pine tree, he's familiarizing himself with his surroundings, and in turn embracing his loneliness instead of wallowing in its effects. The color strip itself is a cobalt blue with an intensity or chroma higher than the norm given to suggest optimism amidst his recluse.
Here Huey reflects on the hurt of what's around him and the memories of his previous failures to find solace in what lives in his backyard. Using deep sub-hues of cobalt blue, reflects back to him being lost in his loneliness, with no escape. Walking away but still looking back on a distant memory of physical pain doing life's work is representational of everyone's fault in doing so. It's often difficult to move forward when we can't shake those deeply embedded memories of things that are no longer an extension of us. So difficult that those faint memories shadow what we are becoming or growing into, but as the layering in the photo shows, it's capable of clouding our vision.
As a result of his own memories, Cobalt retracts back to what he knows his loneliness to be, a "generally unhappy" state of mind. His old memories always keep him grounded and prohibits him from creating new ones. Something like how certain people we know keep us grounded in who we were while discouraging who we're becoming. It's a constant tug and pull for Huey. He's living between the sulk of his loneliness and the freedom from it. As he considers accepting this as his permanent form because his memories can't escape him, as we all do, he is stripping himself of his true color that he developed in his previous state. Stuck in the mental stage of evolution.
Exhausted of his past pain, Huey decides to also take a more optimistic approach and remember some of the few happier times he had around his backyard. Bending down he feels like a slave to joy, he seeks it, fights for it, but never finds. Possibly the joy he's been hunting for has been within himself the entire time, even possibly connecting this joy with his life's work. However, his happy memories only last but for so long before he reverts back to analyzation of appreciating his loneliness and cultivating a new point of view of it, or sticking to what he has known for so long. Saturated colors are directly linked to joyous moods, but in this case, a memory saturated state of mind.
In accepting his memories as subsidiaries of his being, he decides to develop a self that he has yet manifested while still maintaining the integrity of Cobalt Huey. Reflecting on sectors of himself that he began, but didn't finish, he begins to sulk as he used to doing. It's a long process for him to readjust and get acquainted with who he chose to be.
Ending with my personal favorite photo from the set, this represents a deepening scornful path ahead of him. Transitioning from, simply, a sad state of mind to a happier one will be difficult because essentially embodying a gradient of blue to dominantly red is damn near impossible. It's work. It's a lot to go through. Walking from one end to cross over into a hill of rock, moss, thorns, sticks and other harsh children nature has to offer. The leaf greens with federal blue accents also feeds into a naturally potent setting to grow into. The tidepool reflected in the water with even deeper aquamarine mossed rocks beneath its surface suggests something darker than the primary color in this image.
A visual about being melancholy and black in the suburbs.
As extension of the photo narrative, the film shows what Cobalt Huey might do on a day to day. The opening scene represents walking away from something to go through something else, to return right back to where you started. This is an effect of life, personal decisions, relationships and friendships which some of us are able to stay away from, but the majority of us find it hard to do. There are so many possible interpretations of both the photoset and film so, honestly, I put my intent out there, now you theorists do your thing.
