I have always loved blue, not one blue, but every blue. And nowhere have I experienced it more completely than inside the Sanctuary of Dom Bosco in Brasília, one of the most extraordinary blue stained glass churches in the world.
Located in Brasília, Brazil, the Sanctuary of Dom Bosco is a modernist architectural landmark dedicated to Saint John Bosco, who once dreamed of a luminous city in South America long before Brasília was built. Designed by Carlos Alberto Naves and completed in 1963, the church feels like a realization of that vision: light transformed into structure through thousands of panels of blue stained glass.
My work as an artist has always returned to blue: the shifting tones of early morning, the depth of open water, the edge of a winter sky. Blue in all its variations has followed me, and I have spent years chasing it in paint. Nothing prepared me for experiencing the Sanctuary of Dom Bosco in person.
Inside the Blue Stained Glass Church of Dom Bosco
I had seen photographs of the Sanctuary of Dom Bosco in Brasília, of course. But photographs of this blue stained glass church are almost a disservice. They suggest something beautiful when the reality is something closer to overwhelming. The sanctuary is built almost entirely of blue stained glass: 7,400 pieces set into 87 panels, arranged in a honeycomb structure that filters the Brazilian light into something unearthly. You don't just see the blue here. You are inside it.
Walking through the entrance, I stopped. The entire interior of the Dom Bosco church glows in a deep, saturated cobalt that shifts as the light moves, pulling in violet at the edges, softening to aquamarine near the ceiling. It is the kind of blue that feels alive. The kind that makes you understand why painters have spent entire careers trying to capture it.
The Modernist Architecture of the Dom Bosco Sanctuary, Brasília
The structure itself is extraordinary. The Sanctuary of Dom Bosco is one of the most distinctive examples of modernist architecture in Brasília. The building is formed by a series of pointed arches that rise and repeat like a cathedral forest, each one filled with luminous blue stained glass. There is a geometry to the space that feels both rigorous and organic, precise in its construction, but expansive in its effect. Standing inside, I felt the architecture working the way great art does: not explaining itself, just insisting on being experienced.
I stayed longer than I planned. Sitting in one of the pews, I watched the light move through the stained glass as the afternoon shifted. The blue changed constantly, deeper, softer, almost silver at the edges. It was one of those rare places where architecture, light, and color become inseparable, and where a space gives you exactly what you didn't know you needed.
Color as Language: What the Blue of Dom Bosco Taught Me
Standing inside the Sanctuary of Dom Bosco, I kept thinking about Josef Albers and his foundational argument in Interaction of Color: that color is never fixed, always relative, always shaped by what surrounds it. The blue inside this Brasília church proves that completely. It is not one blue, but hundreds, shifting with the angle of the sun, the density of cloud, and your position in the space. The same panel reads as deep indigo from one pew and soft cerulean from another. What Albers described as simultaneous contrast is happening here at an architectural scale.
It is the same negotiation I face in my own studio. Edges bleed. Layers accumulate unpredictably. A color shifts the moment it meets another. The tape lifts, leaving behind a surface you didn't plan. I wrote about this directly in working within constraint as a geometric abstract painter. You can see it at scale in Joy in Being, where nearly eight feet of surface holds that negotiation between plan and paint. Each imperfection is a question: hold the line or follow where the paint leads.
Richard Diebenkorn understood this too. His Ocean Park series, those luminous, layered blues and grays, are built on the same principle: color as atmosphere, color as place. I have written about what Diebenkorn's practice means to my own work, and the Dom Bosco blue sits in that same lineage.
I have written more about how Albers' color theory has shaped my own practice in How Josef Albers Shaped the Way I See Color. The Dom Bosco experience is, in many ways, a living illustration of everything he taught.
Why Blue Is the Color I Always Return To
For anyone drawn to color, to the way light shapes experience, the Sanctuary of Dom Bosco is more than a destination. It is a study in how color becomes space. Blue is never just one thing. It holds depth, distance, clarity, and weight all at once. Inside this Brasília church, blue becomes immersive, something you move through, not just observe.
That pursuit exists in my own work too. I return to blue again and again, not to replicate what I saw, but to understand it. To explore how a single color can shift, expand, and carry structure. In my geometric mountain paintings, blue often holds the composition together, deep, architectural, and grounded in form. In coastal works, it moves differently, more fluid, more responsive, shaped by rhythm and change. That coastal body of work, and how the shoreline translates into geometric form, is something I explore in depth in Geometric Coastal Art: Translating Coastal Landscapes into Abstract Paintings. But in both, the intention is the same: to create a space where color does the work.
The experience of the Sanctuary of Dom Bosco didn't change that direction. It clarified it. Original Geometric Mountain Full Moon lives in that register: a blue that holds the stillness of night, where the geometry recedes and the color carries everything. And if you feel the pull of blue in its more coastal, fluid form, Ebb and Flow works in that same emotional key.
If a work like this is calling to you, my guide to collecting geometric abstract art is a good place to start.
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