Unearthing Colour: Black
Updated: 8 hours ago
In this post and series, I'm exploring the many blacks in my studio, vine, lamp, carbon, sepia (not a true black), as part of a new blog series I'm calling 'Unearthing Colour.'
Research has always been part of how I work, not just before a project, but woven right through it. So, I've decided to set myself a bit of a challenge each month or two; to look more closely at the colours that make up my earthy palette.
First up is black. My dad said that as a teenager I dressed as a Victorian widow (I have always liked black clothes), so why not start here. BTW I have added more colour since those early years and my husband is just about to use our new sewing machine to create me a cross over linen top in the colours found on moors, but that is for another time.
Black isn't singular
Black isn't just one colour in my studio, it's a whole tribe. Vine, lamp, carbon, ivory, charcoal, sepia, flame, graphite.
Each one sits differently on the plate, in the ink, on the linen. I've spent time in the the last weeks completing black pigment tests on linen, alongside sepia photogravure prints, and it's had me thinking a lot about what black and other pigments mean in my practice. Over these posts I want to share the colours, the process, and a bit of the philosophy/history behind why I keep coming back to certain colours.
Vine black
Vine black is one of the oldest pigments still in use. It comes from charred grapevine and twig, and people have been making it since prehistory. There's a warmth in it, a brownish undertone that sits so naturally against ochre and red chalk. It's the black I reach for most, bound with soya milk.
I won't go into all of it here, but I've recently been gifted some Leicestershire vine, and I'll soon be having a go at making my own vine black from it. More on that when it happens.
I have decided to wait until its cold enough to put on the log burner but I have already found a suitable tin and the vines remind me they're waiting, every time I go to the shed.
Sepia
Not strictly black I realise, but I feel it belongs in this tribe. Sepia takes its name from the cuttlefish, whose ink was used for warm brown wash drawings going right back to antiquity. The sepia in my printmaking ink isn't actually from cuttlefish though, it's iron oxide and carbon black blended to sit close to that same tone. I think I enjoy sepia so much because it feels nostalgic. It reminds me of old photographs, faded and a little softened, the kind you find in a drawer and stop to look at for longer than you meant to. It is also the colour of autumn for me. It has the warmth of leaves on the turn, low sunlight and a mug of coffee grounds. It makes a print feel gentle and settled and has been used lots lately on my photopolymer prints. Where a pure black can feel hard, sepia feels warm, lived in.
I've been using Sailor black ink for sketching too, and lately I've been doing quick gestural marks of blossom and branches, with a dip pen, not looking at what I'm doing but drawing the sense of it. Some of the drawing inks I've usedcome out with a real blue purple look, others sit much more brown. I find it interesting to see how differently they behave compared to the printmaking blacks, but sailor black is a firm new favourite.
Kuro, black in Japanese aesthetics
In Japanese aesthetics, black isn't absence, it's depth. Tanizaki, in his essay on shadow and light, argued that beauty lives not in objects themselves but in the play of shadow and darkness between them. That idea sits behind a lot of what I make, as ink pooled in a plate's recesses is doing the same work as a shadow in a room. I have enjoyed creating many an ink painting in my sketch book this year, having returned to depicting clouds and rain, from our dramatic Lincolnshire skies.
Lamp black
Lamp black is vine black's cooler cousin. Traditionally soot collected from burning oil, it's finer, stronger, more neutral. I find it can feel a little flat next to the earth blacks but I aim to explore more. Above I used clear crayons to get those shapes within the clouds. They're really fun to use and who doesn't love to feel like a kid making art again!
Carbon and the Romans
Carbon black has been made the same basic way for thousands of years. Burn something, collect the soot, bind it. The Romans used it for ink and wall paint, and it's one of the most lightfast pigments ever made, having barely changed in tone since antiquity.
Flame and soot, how these blacks are made
Nearly every carbon based black starts the same way. Something burns, and what's left behind is the pigment. Lamp black, vine black, even old world flame black, all soot, just from different sources. Strange to think the darkest mark I make on paper starts as fire.
I used to live in a Georgian town house, three storeys tall, with a coal hatch in the pavement and a cellar underneath. When the coal came, it would have gone down the hatch in a rush of noise and dust. By the time we arrived, the coal was delivered in sacks through the front door, then placed down a trapdoor. In the damp cellar it turned into a greasy black film that smeared rather than brushed away. Soot is sticky. It clings to whatever it touches, and that is why people have used it for so long.
The Romans knew this too. Vitruvius describes burning resin and collecting the soot, then binding it with glue for wall paint or gum for ink. The same carbon ink was used on the Vindolanda tablets, found near Hadrian’s Walla place we walked beside a lot as children. It's now in the British Museum, still dark after nearly two thousand years, because carbon cannot burn any further.
Fire also turns up in an incredibly moving book I have just read, There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. One of its strands follows Arthur, a poor boy in Victorian London who becomes an engraver and teaches himself to read cuneiform.
He is loosely based on the real George Smith, who worked in the British Museum and in 1872 read the flood story on a tablet from Nineveh. Those tablets came from the library of Ashurbanipal. When Nineveh was sacked in 612 BC, the library burned, and the fire baked the clay hard. The thing meant to destroy the library is the reason the tablets survived.
...& Smith was an engraver, so he spent his working days with ink, plates and paper, which is not far from what happens in my own studio. A great book and one I'd highly recommend.
Black on linen, the textile side
Vine black, along with ivory and lamp black go onto my linen pieces, and they are colours which behave differently on cloth than on paper.
I feel its softer, more absorbed, more part of the fibre than sitting on top of it.
I notice a link between hand stitching and hand grinding pigment. Both are slow, both are about repetition and touch. Black thread against pigmented linen holds a different kind of mark making to ink on paper.
For me, it makes it not always simply about the image, more about the surface itself.
The blacks themselves vary so much and the weight of the fabric changes how theyre reflected too so I have completed a fair few test pieces to return to to help me decide which to use.
They are displayed with little magnets so I can easily test them against each other.
Black and light together
After all this, black keeps coming back to the same place for me. It's what makes the light visible.
In the blossom print, in the shadow of a stitch on linen, the black is never really the subject. It's what lets everything else be seen.
That's the thread running through this whole series colour in my printmaking and textile practice
Black as fullness, not absence
Sculptor Louise Nevelson spoke about falling in love with black, and the idea that it holds every other colour inside it rather than shutting them out. If you're unfamiliar with her sculptures, look up Rain Forest Wall, one of my favourites.
These small pieces (above) are ones I stitch to linen, oxidised silver with a line of keum boo gold fused across each one. I love how the gold sits against that black patina, it isn't shouting, it's more of a glow.
The oxidised surface swallows the light while the gold catches it and holds it, so your eye goes straight to that thin line rather than the whole piece.
Lately I have been playing with chromatic blacks in my collagraph work and my landscape based abstracts. A chromatic black is one mixed from colours rather than used straight from the tube, so it carries a noticeable hue in it. Ultramarine and burnt umber make a classic one. I have also been tinting my blacks, which just means adding a small amount of colour to shift them. A touch of blue cools a black down, and a little brown warms it.
Tinting is the word most printmakers understand, though you will also hear people simply say they are warming or cooling a black, which is how I like to simply refer to my aims too.
I have also been making my own Payne’s grey. The traditional recipe uses ultramarine and black, but I am not using ultramarine, so I mix my black with Prussian blue and phthalo blue instead. Prussian gives me a deep, slightly greenish cool, and phthalo is very strong, so I add it a tiny bit at a time. Together with the black I get a cool, deep blue grey. If it feels too cold, I warm it with a touch of burnt umber.
I'll soon be teaching drypoint to a group of (hopefully eager) students at the National Centre of Craft and Design - The Hub.
My husband said that he was also interested in the technique, so here's one of his first prints of which he's rightly proud.
He will be selling some at artisan markets next to me soon and has even commissioned his own hanko.
Traditionally stamped in red at the bottom corner (right or left) of the artwork, they act as both a signature and a visual part of the composition
Below are some of my own prints in progress- and if there's a colour you love to have on your walls or which lights you up do let me know in the comments.
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