The palette is of sombre-hued blues. Blue has a long history in Western art of being associated with the spiritual. Goethes nineteenth century study of colour claimed for it a powerful allure: so we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.  A century later, Kandinsky wrote of blue: As it deepens towards black, it assumes overtones of a superhuman sorrow. Mangos single-colour palette means an absence of colour contrasts. With the conversation of colour quietened, tonal range and depth invite a contemplative stillness. The dominant tonal contrast is between the almost-white of the flesh rendition and the almost-black of the backgrounds. Mangos exclusive use of blues issues an invitation to engage, the colour suggesting an enriched encounter that reinstates the spiritual where the physical had been seen as mere matter.

Jane Petkovic, Honouring the body in James McAuleys Pieta and Simone Mangos When she Was Thirteen.