Black is Beautiful

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

“I’ve been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.”
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Black can be rightly considered the first artist’s color, if we are to judge by the evidence left us in the ancient cave paintings and drawings of the Neolithic peoples who lived in southern France more than 30,000 years ago. Charcoal from burnt twigs would have been a natural choice for these proto-artists, and although no one can say for sure whether they made drawings as an expression of art or for some other purpose, we are the beneficiaries of their graphic inspirations. While we have so many material choices available to us today for expressing ourselves in black and white, the finest artist’s charcoal is still made essentially from burned twigs!

There is much to read about all the other pigment colors out there, but less is found about the use of the color black. As the primary color in a painting, black can evoke s…