The Chinese have been working in black ink for over 2000 years and for the last 700 years European artists have cast aside the colour spectrum and have focused instead on the visual power of black, white and everything in between. I am no exception.
It is very freeing as, without the complexity of colours, I can happily experiment with form, texture, mark making and symbolic meaning. The extreme focus of black on a white surface is an immediate commitment that I can't come back from. It instantly asks to be completed - like galloping horses down a hill, it has to be directed to its destination.
From years at art college painting piled up wooden chairs, the void has
always had more worth to me than the object itself. The space between the flowers, the road between the buildings, the glass between the frame...the space is what makes there there. A fishing net is useless without the holes.
For me, the black ink gives me a clarity of shape and the voids between become more clearly defined.
The earliest surviving works of Western
art made in grisaille (painting in monochrome) were created in the Middle Ages for devotional purposes, to eliminate distractions, and focus the mind. Religious orders were known to regard colour as a forbidden fruit, for example, and Cistercian monks created grisaille stained glass in the 12th century an an alternative to vibrant church windows in stained glass.
From the 15th century onward artists made painted studies in black and white to work through challenges posed by their subjects and compositions. Eliminating colour allowed the artists to concentrate on the way light and shadow fell across the surface of a figure, object or scene before committing to an expensive full-colour canvas.
The invention of photography in 1839, and that of film much later, prompted painters to imitate the effects in order to respond to or compete with their particular qualities.
To put it simply, for me working in black and white is a pure distillation as it removes the sometime confusion I find with colour and it helps me to make clearly defined choices. Let me know what you think.
コメント