Why I Draw on Black

Most drawings begin with darkness added to light: a pencil onto white paper, shadow by shadow, until the image arrives. Working in white chalk on black canvas reverses the entire process. The canvas begins as night. Every mark I make is a mark of light.

It sounds like a small technical inversion. It is not. When you draw the light instead of the shadow, you stop describing objects and start describing how they are seen. A face is no longer a nose and two eyes — it is a cheekbone catching a window, the bright line along a jaw. Everything unnecessary simply stays black.

I came to this way of working almost by accident, on an evening when the only paper left in the studio was a scrap of black mounting board. Ten years later, it is still how I think. The dark is not the absence of the drawing. The dark is most of the drawing.

People sometimes ask whether working this way is slower. It is — enormously. Chalk cannot be erased from canvas without a ghost. Each highlight is a commitment. But I have come to believe the slowness is where the stillness in the finished work comes from. You cannot rush light.