Reviving Mayan Blue
A Mexican artist rediscovers a lost color sacred to his ancestors. The post Reviving Mayan Blue appeared first on Nautilus.
Luis May Ku was intent on finding the plant. He felt certain that somewhere among the shrubs of his home village in Mexico or in the surrounding jungle grew the wild ch’oj. He needed the plant to extract indigo, a dye he could experiment with to unlock the recipe of “Mayan blue”—a pigment no longer available in the markets of the Yucatan peninsula, and a favorite color of the Mayan gods.
“There are five cardinal points in the Mayan cosmogony,” says May Ku, who is a ceramics artist and