No color

What is a no color painting? Drawing is a hidden art. Or perhaps it’s more like a magic trick.

When you dispense with color, you lose a very important part. I’d say it takes away 70 or 80 percent of the tools you have to create visual art. It’s like stripping the clothes and jewelry off the mannequin and being left with only that bare wooden waist. What can you do in these circumstances?

Of course, you can draw with color, but that’s a branch of painting, not drawing.

It takes a lot of courage to, in these diminished conditions, insist on making art or something resembling it. Tools are scarce. Skill becomes essential. As long as we know what the necessary skill is.

We’re left with only monochrome tracers like pencil, ink, charcoal, shadows, highlights, and little else. Now the how becomes central. We have to decide.

Shadows and half-shadows must be invented in the appropriate place. Appropriate appropriation. In the past, a color or a duo of colors in dialogue could save your canvas. Now you only have the shadow from zero to one hundred.

Even the composition is threatened with death when color has stopped helping, balancing. Of distracting, why not? Without color, the composition is different. Shadows weigh more than volumes. Light is purer, and the scarcer it is, the purer.

With all these limitations, you have to be a magician. It’s crucial to create art from a few strokes. These strokes must attract people. And worse yet, to manage to provoke something in them. An emotion, a smile.