2573.Now, I don't know what it is about mininalist art. Oddly enough, when you render something complex in an elemental form, such as black and white, somehow it becomes even more alive.
I have a hypothesis about that.
I came upon it when watching a rerun of The Twilight Zone, the classic, Serling version. One of my favorite episodes is one called "The Midnight Sun". The main part of the story concerns a young woman, an artist by profession, just trying to survive minute to minute in an environment which has become literally untenable; the Earth, for some reason, has begun to spiral into the sun, and the sun has become so big in the sky, that there is no night anywhere - just relentless heat. Hence, the title.
Effective set dressing helped, but the lack of color forced my mind to work. I could feel it happening. I watched the TV image, and while I did, my brain was overlaying sense impressions that weren't obvious because the color cuese were not there in the image. I felt drawn in and subsumed into the teleplay; it wasn't an abstract thing - a tenuous part of me was with that woman, dying under the hostile sun.
I needed a glass of water while I was watching it.
Black and white - or monochrome - art does this to you. It involves you. It makes your brain work for the image. I'm sure, if you did a CAT scan of a person percieving a B/W image vice a color one, you'd see different areas of the brain active. And I know you can't feel it, physically, but somehow I did.
There is a webcomic I just stumbled on, the full title of which is Supermassive Black Hole A*. It's also simply called A-Star. The object in question is the supermassive black hole that's supposed to be at the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy; it's called A for Aquarius, the Zodiacal sign in which the galaxy's center can be found, and the asterisk, or "star", denotes that it's the biggie, number 1. The title gives itself to a hard SF comic of the far future in which Mankind lives amongst the Galactic Core and near and around A-Star.
But enough of that. I told you all that to tell you this: this comic is amazing because its palette involves just black, white, and the occaisional shades of gray:
Everything is that way, from the interior scenes to the space scenes. It draws you in, and the storyline is harsh and unforgiving on the characters - they all play for keeps in thier contexts - and it drew me in. I wasted (not really) a couple of hours yesterday, following the story of far-future megacorps and assassinations and revenge.
I find it amazing.
Here's the URL: http://smbhax.com/
Read it or … you kinda suck. I don't mean to be mean, but I gotta tell you the truth.
Illustrator Lucy Knisley has matched up the alphabet with a significant character from the history of comics. It's a poster that you can buy and to do so, you can go here:
