The Quest for the Ultimate Black…

The Quest for the Ultimate Black

The raw, driving rhythm of the Rolling Stones’ "Paint It Black" was vibrating through the air, its dark, insistent drone settling into the quiet corners of my studio. Listening to it, I found my thoughts drifting away from the music and toward my own workspace. As a painter, my relationship with colour is tactile, historical, and deeply practical. I began to think about what it actually means to paint something black. To an artist, black is not a monolith or a mere absence of light; it is a complex universe of temperature, texture, transparency, and tone. The song made me contemplate the long lineage of hands that have reached into the dark, seeking to master the ultimate shadow.

When we strip away the romance of art history, we find that the story of black begins with fire. In the Stone Age, paleolithic artists discovered that the charred remains of burnt wood provided a reliable medium for translating their reality onto stone walls. Shortly thereafter, an even denser, richer variant emerged from the flames when ancient humans began heating animal bones in the absence of oxygen. The resulting residue, known as bone black, offered a deeper blue-black hue that proved far more intense than ordinary charcoal. This material became an enduring cornerstone of artistic practice, finding its way onto Egyptian tombs, Greek pottery, and medieval manuscripts.

For the Old Masters, navigating the studio meant operating as a practical chemist. Long before the convenience of the modern art supply shop, a painter had to understand the physical and chemical behavior of every powder on their slab. In the seventeenth century, a painter looking for a reliable black would often use bone black, which carried a warmer, brownish undertone. This warmth made it a marvelous tool for underpainting, allowing artists to establish structural shadows in backgrounds and flesh tones that felt organic rather than dead. Think of Johannes Vermeer, whose controlled palette relied on these subtle shifts; technical analysis shows he used bone black to ground the dark marble floor tiles in The Music Lesson.

In the mid-twentieth century, abstract expressionist Ad Reinhardt pushed this pursuit to its logical extreme. He spent years painting his famous "ultimate" black paintings, which appeared at first glance to be simple, uniform squares of dark color. Reinhardt painstakingly washed the oil out of his tube paints and mixed the remaining pigment with regular solvent, creating an exceptionally matte surface that rejected any vulgar sheen. He wanted a black that was pure, intellectual, and entirely non-reflective—a black that did not look like paint, but like an idea.

However, the twenty-first century brought an entirely new category of material science that completely redefined the limits of what human eyes could perceive as black. In 2014, researchers in the United Kingdom unveiled Vantablack, consisting of a dense forest of microscopic carbon nanotubes. When light strikes Vantablack, it becomes trapped in the tiny spaces between the vertical tubes, bouncing around until it is completely absorbed and dissipated as heat. The original material absorbed an astonishing 99.965% of visible light, making any three-dimensional object coated in it completely lose its structural depth to the human eye, appearing like a flat silhouette.

The conceptual sculptor Anish Kapoor immediately recognized its radical aesthetic potential and struck a deal with the creators, purchasing the exclusive artistic rights to use Vantablack. The art world's reaction was swift and furious. Out of this frustration, British artist Stuart Semple took direct aim at Kapoor’s exclusivity. He collaborated with color scientists and thousands of working artists to create Black 3.0, an affordable, ultra-matte acrylic liquid paint that absorbs over 98% of visible light. When applied to an object, it mimics that same deep, velvety flatness, stripping away highlights and reflections, and it is available to every artist on earth—as long as they can prove they are not Anish Kapoor.

Standing in my studio now, looking at the modern tubes of black oil paint resting on my table, I am struck by the vast, silent history contained within those small containers. When I pick up a brush and load up the pigment my intent is exactly the same as that of the paleolithic hunter. We are all trying to capture the mystery of the dark. The Rolling Stones wanted to use black as a shroud to erase the world, but as painters, we know that black is actually a tool of revelation. It is the deep, silent shadow that allows every other light around it to truly shine.