Black Inkworks

[There are MUCH LARGER IMAGES of 10 Black works in the more recent White Paints and Black Ink image gallery. Thumbnails of these are at the bottom of this page. Also below are thumbnails of the 7 Black works at the Meridian show in San Francisco and 3 black Paintings among the "Baby Bloores".]

Black Inkworks of Various Sizes

In 1980, when Bloore discovered architects' drafting tapes he shot off in a new direction. He had been doing oil sketches on blocks of watercolour paper. With these tapes used as resists and Sumi ink applied with brushes he could make black space and draw with the revealed paper. These explorations led to a language of forms Bloore would paint with from 1986 onwards. But the unmodulated black fields would not scale up for major work without overwhelming the content - at least not until 2004. Bloore's efforts at the time to mitigate this effect by diluting the inks with water and then switching from Japanese to European inks gave rise to the Inkworks of 1983 - 86.