Black Archives – Meredith Lindemon

Berlin Blue

Berlin Blue composes the base of every other recorded color of blue, that Werner named in his Nomenclature. It also creates the secondary set of blues that Werner named as foundational, which include Greenish Blue (Sky Blue) and Greyish Blue (Cobalt Glass).

It is interesting to note that, in nature, the blues often appear on the feathers of birds or in copper ore, from the earth. Berlin Blue is basically a lighter, cooler Prussian Blue, which has more black and a bit of a mid-blue, which is indigo, folded together. Indigo and Prussian Blues are both found in Blue Copper Ore, Prussian also in cyanide. But Berlin Blue is the color of an untreated Sapphire.

Velvet Black

Black: the color of discretion and modesty. Of authority. Of sin and death. Velvet Black, the basis of all the black tints, my favorite kind of black—my favorite color. This particular black is not absolute, but it is foundational. There is still enough red, and not a complete degree of blackness, to be capable of subtracting other colors to create a warm or cool tint.

There’s a mystical nature to black that’s also the basis of the way people did talk about color in the Biblical Hebrew. I think it was interesting that, while no language for individual colors existed—like red, blue, etc., until some time quite later, but color was referred to by the way it captured light or reflected it (among other ways).