What It Means to Start in Complete Darkness ✨

Almost every canvas in Animarii Unzipped begins the same way. I black it out completely. The whole surface. Not a toned ground, not a dark underpainting. Black. Total.

There is a practical reason for this, and then there is the real reason.

The practical reason is that it creates depth. When you build colour out of darkness, the shadows are already there. You are not adding darkness later, which always looks slightly wrong, slightly applied. You are revealing light from within something that was already dark. The result is a quality of luminosity that you cannot achieve the other way around. Dark to light reads differently to light to dark. You feel it before you can explain it.

But that is not why I started doing it.

I started doing it because I noticed that the blank white canvas was making me perform. There is something about white that demands justification from the first mark. Every line is visible against it. Every decision is exposed from the beginning. It invites a kind of self-consciousness that I did not want in the work.

The black canvas does something different. It is already committed. It has already gone somewhere. The question is no longer what do I want to make, it is what is already here that I have not yet found. That is a completely different relationship to the surface.

This shift sounds small and it is not. The white canvas asks you to build something. The black canvas asks you to excavate something. Those are not the same activity, and they do not produce the same kind of work.

Most of the Unzipped pieces contain entire worlds below the zipper that arrived in this excavation stage and surprised me. The circuitry in the Fox. The cracked earth under the Rhino. The deep tones beneath the Elephant. I did not plan these in the way you might plan a composition on paper first. They emerged because the black ground was already pointing somewhere, and I followed it.

There is a long tradition of this in mystical thought, the idea that creation does not come from nothing but from a prior darkness. In Kabbalistic cosmology, the universe began as a contraction, a withdrawal of divine light to make space for something new to exist. In many Indigenous creation stories, the world is born out of the void, the deep water, the silent dark. The first act is not adding but uncovering.

I am not claiming my painting practice as cosmology. But I do think that how you begin something shapes what it becomes in ways that are not always visible in the finished work. The black ground is still present underneath every colour I lay over it. It is in the painting even when you cannot see it. That darkness is structural.

People sometimes ask whether starting in black feels heavy or limiting. It does not. It feels like permission. The canvas has already made one decision, which means I only have to make the next one. And the next one after that. The work proceeds as discovery rather than invention, and discovery, in my experience, is where the interesting things live.

Some of the best moments in these paintings happened because I was following the dark rather than trying to overwrite it. The black is not the absence of the painting. It is the first layer of it.

Explore the Animarii Unzipped Collection here.