Black (To see this one you’ll have to have it full screen)
This subject sent me to educate myself a little about the colour Black in modern art, through John Gages's book, Colour and Meaning. A quote of the Japanese painter Hokusai caught my attention and got my wheels spinning:
"There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous [brilliant] black and matt black, black in sunlight and black in shadow. For the old black one must use an admixture of blue, for the matt black an admixture of white; for the lustrous black gum [colle] must be added. Black in sunlight must have grey reflections."
This made me try to create an image made up of blacks only, different ones. If you zoomed in to any spot you would say it’s black, yet zooming out would allow a picture to appear.
Frankly I don’t think it’s a very aesthetically pleasing result. First of all I think I should have put a light on my hair too to have more detail. Secondly, I underexposed on purpose, but looking back I would have exposed correctly and then clipped out with more control the areas of my choosing.
* Edmond de Goncourt, 'Hokusai: les albums traitant de al peinture et du dessin avec ses preface', Gazette des beaux-arts, XXXVI (3eme per. XIV, 1895), p. 442. The translation is based on Ad Reinhardt, 'Black as Symbol and Concept', in Barbara Rose (ed.), Art as Art: the Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (1975), p. 86. I took the quote from John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London, 1999), p. 229.