Blue Monday, considered the saddest day of the year, is celebrated today, on January 16th. This event has taken place every third Monday of January since 2005, when the travel agency Sky Travel commissioned psychologist Cliff Arnall, a researcher at Cardiff University, to define the most depressing day of the year in order to try to sell more trips on the back of it.

Arnall then determined that the election should be held on the third Monday in January by a formula in which he factored in the average wage, the cold weather and the frustration of not having fulfilled New Year's resolutions along with the melancholy of the end of Christmas.

Since romanticism, the colour blue has been associated with all those feelings and sensations that have to do with passivity, including sadness.

Monday is preceded by the word blue because of so many cultures in which this colour is associated with sadness and depressive episodes. According to Goethe, blue is the colour of tranquillity, the most relaxing colour... the most passive. And that is why, since romanticism, the colour blue has been associated with all those feelings and sensations that have to do with passivity, including sadness. Something that artists have never overlooked, as can be seen in works such as those by Picasso in his blue period (1901-1904) in which, after the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas and the experience of his economic precariousness, Picasso focused his gaze on the world of loneliness, of human misery and chose the colour blue to represent his pictorial vision, or on the musical plane, when the genre that describes depressive states and situations of melancholy was given the name of blues.

For Egyptians, blue colour was considered the colour of the universe and of life, hence the need to depict it on their sarcophagi and statues.

For much of human history there was no word to describe the colour blue, and the first known blue dates back to 2,200 BC in Egypt, where evidence has been found of how to melt siliceous sand, calcite, copper ore and natron at 850º, obtaining the pigment known as "Egyptian Blue". For them, this colour was considered the colour of the universe and of life, hence the need to depict it on their sarcophagi and statues. Later came ultramarine blue, which came to be called "true blue" and was derived from lapis lazuli, and was so difficult to obtain that painters such as Vermeer were ruined for being able to use it in works such as "The Girl with the Pearl Earring".

In honour of this special and significant colour, we have brought together works by our VLAB artists who have managed to give blue the special role it deserves.