Crimson Noctiluca emerged from an experiment with boundaries. For years, I’ve built my darks the way one builds a symphony, layering Payne’s gray with deep blues, purples, and forest greens until the shadows sang with hidden color. But this piece called for something different. Something absolute.
I reached for Musou Black, the blackest black commercially available, a paint that devours 98% of light that touches it. Full throttle. No safety net.
The result is a landscape that exists in contradiction: a crimson sun that seems to generate its own luminescence, suspended in a void so complete it challenges the eye’s ability to perceive depth. A solitary figure stands at the precipice with her animal companion, witness to something that feels both apocalyptic and intimate.
The Photography Paradox
Here’s what the camera cannot capture, the “highlights” you see in the photograph are not highlights at all. In person, those warm ochres, burnt siennas, and living corals pulse with an energy that 500+ megapixels of human vision can perceive, but my lens cannot. The Musou Black creates a depth that swallows the surrounding color in photographs, rendering them ghostly when they are, in reality, vibrant and warm. It’s the black hole of the color world. I probably will not be making prints of this painting.
I’ve tried every lighting configuration, every camera setting, every post-processing trick. Some art simply demands physical presence. This is one of those pieces. I apologize for the photograph, not the art.
Acrylic on canvas, 18″ x 24″, Available.
A Meditation on Black
This piece marks a departure, and likely a farewell. The absence of light (or is it the presence of everything absorbed?) feels antithetical to how I experience the world. I paint to illuminate, not to obliterate. Crimson Noctiluca stands as a singular exploration into the void, a testament to what happens when you push color to its absolute limit.
Some experiments teach you what you don’t want. Others teach you exactly what you needed to know.
