In the Black (& White) - Esther

There are no grey areas here. 

I like black & white art & I’m very black & white about this.

I’m not saying there’s nothing to be said for colourful art but showing my true colours, I’m a monochrome fiend. By “monochrome” here, I’m insisting on black & white - there are other claims for “monochrome” as an artistic term (all blue, all cyan) but here I’ll be referring to black & white only. 

& why not? You might think, “But when there’s so much gloom in the world, why wouldn’t you want a bit of colour?” This would be to misunderstand monochrome altogether. It’s not just about mood.

Let’s face it, we’ve had some very hot & sunny days by Scotland-in-May standards, the daffodils have come & gone & are things less gloomy? Not particularly.   

Jasper Johns

The practical reasons for black & white are of course many, not least in book & magazine illustration, where colour printing would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. Etchings & various printing art techniques are simplified using a single black ink. Nowadays, we (should) consider the environmental impact of everything we do & black & white or “eco” options are often available even for home printing. Monochrome should not be reduced to this, however. It is a skill of its own to create a world, image or idea in nothing but black & white.

Georgia O'Keeffe

As an artist, I find the satisfaction of using a black pen, ink or pencil far outweighs the quagmire of colour choices & what might be read into the work by using particular colours. As an artist, you might be looking to communicate with the spectator & who needs them to misinterpret your perfectly rendered grass as a metaphor for envy? Or your aforementioned daffodils as a symbol for cowardice? Or your carefully painted tomatoes as representing embarrassment, anger, danger or blood? Colour itself can be dangerous. As an artist, you have enough to worry about. Monochrome is a golden opportunity to escape these traps. It is far from a colourless choice & wholly expressive in its way.

Pablo Picasso

Incidentally, don’t come to me with your whole, “black & white are not real colours” brand of tedium. I’ve heard it all & ignored it often. If you prefer to get objective, at least be interesting about it. Back it up. BLACK IS ALL COLOURS. It is the absorption of the colours of the visible spectrum. White reflects all colours, black sucks them in. They are achromatic. Black & white combined are a mightily powerful force of nature & worthy of a million works of art & ancient cultural icons. They were two of the first colours used in cave paintings. They are science & civilisation combined.

Jean-August-Dominique Ingres

It’s not simply an absence of colour either. This attitude derives from a certain sniffiness about monochrome as a serious artistic decision, despite Old Masters like Ingres having a go. Professional artist friends of mine that frequent the monochromatic path have had to listen to well-meaning but nevertheless irritating suggestions of designing a colouring book to cash in on the now slightly waning trend of high end colouring books “for adults.” As if you have to distance yourself from the horror of indulging in a “childish” activity. Or as if fine art & the decisions artists make about using/not using colour have to be rectified by someone else’s felt tips. Many artists have published very beautiful colouring books, including the wonderful Abigail Larson whose Wonderland book shows variety in line as well as enormous detail. I should say, I am a fan of colouring in but this doesn’t mean black & white art isn’t a means to its own self-coloured end. I happen to own a Harry Clarke colouring book. It’s basic & quite poorly-executed (a commission I’d have jumped at!) & was bought only as an obsessive…I mean collector. It reduces down some of his beautiful watercolours to plain flat lines when in reality colouring in his Faust or Poe illustrations would have provided more satisfying hours of fun.

Abigail Larson's Alice for colouring - beautiful

Harry Clarke for colouring - ugh

Harry Clarke illustration - stunning

For artists monochrome is an opportunity to complicate the work in alternative ways, to create something bolder. For the rest of us & certainly myself, it may well be a matter of taste or even a wider aesthetic. But I also think of monochrome as its own canvas. We can project or imagine any colours we like into it, which of course includes leaving it as it is. From the fantastical & elaborate Golden Age worlds dreamt up by Arthur Rackham & Aubrey Beardsley through the eye & brain bending optics of Bridget Riley & Michelle Grabner to the monochromatic psychedelia of Trenton Doyle Hancock & Ralph Steadman there is something for everyone. & how tempted to reduce the detail might the latter two have been if they’d been adding colour?

 Rackham & Beardsley

 Riley & Grabner

Steadman & Hancock

There’s the opportunity for an inclusivity of media too. Although my personal favourites revolve around a more illustrative & ink-based approach there are photographs, paintings & sculptures that eschew other colours. A black & white photograph creates new meaning, creates in fact a new subject when a broad colour range is removed, at times even becoming abstract in the hands of Edward Weston, for example. It’s the chance to alter our attentions & encourage our perception towards a less “realistic” focus, to emphasise form, space, shape, composition, line, shadow.

Edward Weston

Without wanting to delve too deeply into the political meanings of colour in this entry, Jasper Johns’s already seditious Flag series is worth mentioning. He subverts the concept further when the flag becomes a monochromatic subject. 

Jasper Johns

There’s beauty in the darkness & the light means very little without it. The spaces are free to shine through as much as the lines are there to hem them in. Our cultural traditions come into sharp focus with black & white. They represent many facets of our lives when put side by side. All humanity is here.

Black: the symbol of night, evil, death, mourning, magic, darkness, authority, depression, elegance, function, burning, strength, sophistication, intrigue, mystery.

White: the symbol of purity, goodness, faith, hope, light, innocence, cleanliness, godliness, ghosts, coldness, chill, emptiness.

Mary Martin

All that, plus it looks good. There. I feel I’ve nailed my colours firmly to the mast.