How appropriate in the week following the Racist Oscars weekend that the ‘colour’ black should feature once more in the news. And not just any black. But Vantablack. The blackest black ever invented.

And invented it needs to be. Black doesn’t really exist in real life but has to be made. And its not a colour. Its the absence of colour (physics 101; the visible spectrum). Yes, white is made up of every single colour and black is nothing. Contrary to intuition perhaps but that’s because we’re humans and intuitions are worthless pieces of shit. And we remember mixing all the paints in our watercolour set and ending up with a horrible brown sludge then assuming that if we carried on we’d just get darker and end up with black. Well ya wouldn’t. Firstly your mother came and confiscated the paints which had managed to get all over the table, chairs, carpets and your grandmother, and secondly, you can’t just get black.

And thus ‘black’ becomes the holy grail for artists. No, I have no idea why either, but that’s the way it is. Without getting too technical (for the obvious reason that I lack the knowledge to do so), we see colours in paint by getting rid of all the other colours. Thus red paint simply (??) eliminates all the green and blue and yellow and the receptors in our eyes just pick up the red wavelength and we say “ITS A BUS!!!!” So for black you need to eliminate all the colours. The whole lot. Until you end up with something so dark, so dense that we actually see nothing at all. And that’s black. The absence of colour, the absence of light stimulation for our eyes.

The picture above is a sample of Vantablack which is painted on a crumpled up piece of silver foil. But you can’t see the folds. In fact you can’t see anything other than ‘black’. A black hole. Not in the Einsteinian way of sucking up entire universes, but a place from which no light escapes.

Because Vantablack absorbs 99.96% of light. At the Tate Modern there’s a bust painted in this stuff and it just looks flat and 2-dimensional because without reflected light (and 0.04% just don’t count for nuffink) we can’t see anything.

This pigment was created to cover stealth bombers and satellites. So Putin can’t see them. And now they’ve given it to Anish Kapoor to play with. And all the other artists are in an uproar about this monopoly. They all want to use it, though for what I can’t imagine, I’m not an artist. And if I got some I’d only ruin more white t-shirts. But like ruin them 99.96% more efficiently than the normal coffee stains could ever hope to do.

Happy Black Tuesday

A xxxx