Artists Who Love Black
Only a few of them shown here......
As someone who loves using black, and sees in it the most subtle variations and greatest power, I’m always drawn to other artists who feel the same way. Artists come to this awareness instinctively, and through temperment, not through any kind of theoretical or ideological manifesto. I suspect a lot of artists who love black are strong drawers…….bold value contrasts give them an immediate jolt. And they have seen the best drawers through history use sheets of black to foil drawn action of all types. There is something about extending black, rather than using it only as line….. black as a surface, a plane, that when seen in contrast to white and other colors, creates space as well as powerful tension.
And then there is the gravitas, the seriousness, the moodiness, even the mournfulness of black, that is so compelling. We start seeing it used a lot beginning with the baroque Caravaggio, whose pictorial conventions moved rapidly throughout Europe. The great draftsman Rembrandt, consistently used the light emerging from darkness in both his prints and his paintings.
Like white, black can be varied in so many ways, and even dark greys can be read as blacks depending on the other value and color relationships in the work. The moment you stop reading hue into a quality of dark color, you are experiencing black.
The old myth that black should not be used in a painting, under the belief that it kills color relationship, has long been outmoded. Matisse famously used black as color.
Yes, you can use black straight out of the tube, and there are a number of different manufactured blacks. But as well, for all intents and purposes, you can mix black in so many ways. Go into your paint box and pick any 2 or 3 pigments that are extremely dark in nature, and more or less opposite each other on the color wheel, mix them in generous proportion one to the other, and you will have something that experiences as black in your paintings. Create dark, and cancel the hue, and you have black.
So for example, mix Prussian blue with raw umber in equal amounts. They are relatively opposite on the color wheel, and they are both extremely dark straight out of the tube. You can do this with a great many colors in your paint box…..I bet you can easily mix 10 different blacks, some warm, some cool, some a bit darker or lighter, but they can all be experienced as black in a painting, depending on the color relationships you’ve established.
Above are 3 of my pieces. In all the images I’ll show in this photo essay, I’ll name the artist but will leave out the work title, year, etc.…..you can search the artist if they interest you.
David Milne (the 4 above), always seems so wonderful and fresh, especially if you encounter only a few at a time. A whole exhibition of Milnes can sometimes seem a bit redundant, too much of a good thing, but he remains hard to discount.
Max Beckmann has always been a favorite for me, because of his wonderful drawing skills, his immediate painting method, his ability to create psychological complexity and truth, and his compositional inventiveness that never seems arbitrary. So many German artists of the last century delivered honest voices in difficult times.
Above, 2 images by Joan Miro. My fascination with Miro has been longstanding and never-wavering. There is a feeling of joyful automatism to everything he makes, from the earliest faux-primitive representational pieces, to his work as an old man. There is a wonderful certainty and ease to everything he does. His great personal humility also makes him a very appealing figure. Of all the surrealists he seems to be somebody who genuinely tapped into the spiritual quality of all things, animate and inanimate, and his works always suggest this.
Antoni Tapies, the 2 pieces above. When you look at Tapies’ early work you’ll see that he painted in a representation manner provocatively and well. It does cause one to weigh the necessity of representation. To this day there remains a real battle regarding the merits of abstraction versus representation, and it is for every painter to determine how this conflict will be resolved. For Tapies, it was possible to leave representation behind.
Pierre Soulages…the 3 pieces above.
Robert Motherwell, the 2 above. So many of the abstract expressionists advanced our understanding of color relationship and the idea that color extension is an essential part of the work (how much of a color is used and the ratio of its mass relative to other colors in the arrangement).
The 4 pieces above are by Otto Rogers, an important Canadian artist, and an artist I knew at the University of Saskatchewan. His influence there was large and probably remains so. He was one of the first contemporary artists I encountered as a young art student, who had a real facility with paint and an ability to make abstract elements relate and seemingly communicate with each other in an intimate way. Through his influence I came to understand the significance of relationship in a painting.
Patterson Ewen, the 3 images above. In Canada we seem to forget our artists so quickly. He’s gone now, and no longer often mentioned, but I remember going to see glorious shows of his, with large works on plywood that were heavily carved with a router and then painted with layers of washed acrylics. Sometimes grey metal sheeting was cut up and nailed into the pieces, like the example directly above.
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Thank you, Debra....I'm glad you enjoyed it!
A wonderful collection of examples and artists! Thank you!