This has actually been in the works for some time now. If my digital mock up means anything, this work has been getting pecked at since April! It all started with some black paint…

Stuart Semple has this paint available called “Black 2.0” which is billed as the Blackest Black available. There’s a whole story behind why Stuart Semple made this black, which involves a lot of funny things and a fued between him and artist Anish Kapoor about Vantablack. I saw a sample of it online and just had to have some. No idea what I was going to do with it, what would make the most sense to try it out on or what would look most successful in it, but I doodled something up. I wanted to work on a longer canvas, and I wanted to give a sort of brightness and darkness to it. I knew I wanted to use contrasting blackest black and the whitest white I could get (heavy body titanium white, nothing special). So I ordered. And I waited for the Blackest Black to come in from the UK.