Tranquility: Blue

Tranquility: Blue (1959) is a color woodblock print that specifies both an emotional state and a chromatic key. The colon in the title establishes a relationship between the concept (tranquility) and the color (blue) — blue is not merely a description of what the print looks like but a proposition about how color produces feeling. Certain blues do generate a physiological calming response, and the long tradition of associating blue with distance, sky, water, and contemplation provides cultural reinforcement for this connection. Uchima builds his composition around variations within a restricted blue palette, each woodblock layer adding a slightly different temperature or value of blue to create depth within apparent uniformity.