“I paint with black because it is powerful and timeless” –Robert Motherwell

What is black, physically, but the admixture (presence) of all the pigments on the artist’s palette.  Conversely, within the rainbow spectrum of visible light waves, it is the absence of any-and-all color frequencies).  Culturally, black carries a host of adverse and negative associations.  It is the color we wear to project grief; the color of night; the color of too-strong coffee; the color of our little black book (with all its secrets); the color of the hat worn or horse ridden to symbolize the arrival of the villain on the scene.  With black magic, we are cursed or spell-bound; when blackmailed, we are left compromised and poorer for it.  It is the color of mystery and murder films (noir); the color of deepest space, of infinity, as we are lost or separated from bright-blue Mother Earth; the color of shadows and ashes.  It is the color of loss and death.

Black is the serious color we wear when we mean business, or for dramatic effect.  Black is the outcast in the colorful world of family photographs, television shows and block-buster movies. Black is rarely someone’s ‘favorite color’ unless prone to depression or aspiring to be a fashionista of the Gothic lifestyle.  We can be in a ‘black’ mood one day and our friends and family will steer clear.  Black connotes sadness and isolation, desolation and disease (the Black Plague).  Black is politically incorrect, but can be socially fashionable (that basic black dress for every occasion).

Black is back! Black is the ‘new’ brown, red or navy blue.  Black is always ‘in’, even when it’s ‘out’. Black is basic. Black is solid and reliable, a term for profitability (in the ‘black’), which will put you in the pink! Black is a symbol of power when it’s a limousine, a diamond, a mink coat or a judge’s robe. Black was the color of every Ford Model T, telephone and office chair until we learned how to break the habit. Google “black” and the search return will be paltry, indeed.  No one has much to say about black. Black is, well…black.

Isn’t it?

Ask an artist and you will get a very different answer. For them black comes in every color of the spectrum. There are red-blacks, yellow-blacks, blue-blacks and brown-blacks.  There are warm blacks and cool blacks; lustrous blacks and flat blacks; but never weak blacks.  Black is a work horse in the art world; a reliable studio friend that will always carry the load assigned to it. Black is for emphasis or a powerful high light; black sets a figure off against a background, or is intended to draw our eye to some important detail. Where once we had just lamp-black (a mixture of soot from a torch or candle shade with fat, oil or egg white), now there is Mars Black, Lamp Black and Ivory Black, each with its own uses.

Black is as old as fire and its use as a tool for expression is as old as civilization, itself.  To learn more about the history of black, I returned to a favorite text: Color- A Natural History of the Palette, by Victoria Finlay (2004).  Her fascination with the origin of colors took her around the world a decade ago, in search of their stories.  For centuries, pigments were derived from natural materials—minerals, chemical residues, plant extractions, dead animals and people.  In their time, the secrets of artists past were in the formulation of their colors.  Now they reside with the chemist in the commercial laboratory and the artist is left in the dark (another black reference!).

According to Finlay, the first intelligible marks made by man were broad sweeping lines with charcoal scraps on torch-lit cave walls of Altamira, Spain, and Lascaux, France, more than 15,000 years ago. Worshipping the effigies of the wild animals, portrayed there, increased the likelihood of a successful hunt.  Throughout early recorded history, mark-making symbolized a period of attentiveness to an object or person outside the self, as a way of preserving a memory, eulogizing a sacred or beloved figure or recording an event or scene for posterity. The Roman, Pliny the Elder, writes of a Greek woman who traces her lover’s shadow on the wall, filling in the form with charcoal, preserving his physical presence in her own way during a long separation.

Throughout the Renaissance, artist like Raphael and da Vinci depended on charcoal for pastel sketches and ‘cartoons’ of their monumental paintings, as guides for their future works on canvas and frescos.  Some critics today believe that their surviving drawings communicate a freshness and spontaneity not found in the finished works, because of the impermanence and natural feel of the medium—charcoal sticks manufactured from the well-suited, willow branch.

Known as an effective and pliable basket weaving material by northern Europeans, what they called “viker”, was known in Middle English as, “wican”, from which we get our word wicker (and “weak” by the way, although the baskets made from this material were anything but!).  Grown like tall grass in marshy, English low-country, the ideal finished product is slowed-cooked in a low-oxygen oven until uniformly blackened throughout.  England’s Coate’s charcoal sticks, long a family business, are considered the best in the world for the purpose.

Finlay’s account of the Middle Eastern symbolism of black eye liner, made from the elemental material, antimony or “Kohl”, and its perceived protective powers for the Taliban; the long history of the use of lead in drawing tools, followed by the international politics, at play over many decades, surrounding the Frenchman, Nicolas Conté’s invention of the graphite pencil and the explanation for why  America’s romance with “things Oriental” meant that most pencils are painted yellow today, makes for fascinating reading.

The invention of ink in China and Egypt 4,000 years ago and the role of Daoism, in defining the mental journey required to create patiently-rendered landscapes, nature scenes and still lifes with a rich, black pine-log soot mixture and a single, broad brush, opens new doors on Western perceptions of the power of black to convey color meaning.  There, mere black becomes multi-chromatic, through time-honored methods of pigment shading and brush control.  In her travels, she also discovers the part that Rhino horn, a European egg-laying wasp, linseed oil, Gutenberg’s press, our Pilgrim Founders, Pirates and South American “campeachy” wood, brought back by Spanish conquerors, would play in the ongoing development of permanent and fade-resistant black dyes and inks.

The French Impressionists of the late 19^th century eschewed the use of black in their colorful paintings.  They believed that black did not occur in nature and so would create a near-black with the blending of vermillion red, ultramarine blue, emerald green or cadmium yellow.  It seems like a long route to take to reach nearly the same point, but it was a purist approach that appealed to these ‘painters of light’.  By the turn of the century, the Post-Impressionists, like Cezanne and Gauguin were adding black to their palette to outline bold planar forms: for Cezanne as a means of creating fragmented, geometric forms that he saw comprising the landscape before him ( a precursor to Cubism), for Gauguin, a means to isolate pure pools of color, as he rendered the figures and landscapes of his adopted South Pacific paradise.

Artists who have worked as print makers over the centuries have relied on a range of black inks to complete their wood cuts, etchings and lithographs, though.  They trade a paint brush for a stylus, litho stone or acid bath because of the power that a final image, in warm tones of black on thick, white paper can convey. Another reason, surprisingly, is the element of loss-of-control that a well-trained painter must submit to, as the printing process yields different outcomes than may have been planned.  For an artist, this is called living on the edge!  It is creative energy at its best.   

Over the course of the 20^th century, certain artists have become known for their work with black paint.  The sampling of work shown here spans several hundred years and includes just a small sampling of what is out there.  It will serve, I hope, as an introduction to the strength and seductive power of black.

I have chosen to feature these black and white works for the month of January as I considered a wintery, wooded scene outside my office window one day.  Overnight, nature had converted the vista from one of deep reds, grays and browns to a black-and-white reality.  The power and timeless quality of the setting in flat, early morning light—reduced to essential line and form, light and shadow and devoid of depth and detail—underscored the ability of black to stand alone as ‘figure’ against the negative ‘ground’ of white, to awe and amaze, to reveal anew what has always been there.

Illustrations (top-to-bottom): Robert Motherwell, Lament for Lorca, lithograph (1982); Stained glass window, French (15th c.), The Cloisters, NY, Jacques Villon, Le Boa Blanc, drypoint (1904); John Murphy, Sprinters, woodcut (1930); Jean Arp, Dreams and Projects, woodcut series (1952); Safet Zec, La Barca, etching (c.2005)