Ink on Paper

Black ink, or “ink” as we tend to call it today, is a coloured liquid substance used in writing, printing, painting. It is so called because it was thought that the first colour used was black.

Ink is known since the ancient times. If we write that “Human history has been recorded in ink” most people will think of books. Much earlier, human memory was painted on the rocks of caves in ink, long before the concept of writing was even invented.

The ink literally captures the archetypes of memory – all the recordings, but also the concepts that the human species is saving for the last 100.000 years – first through the imprint that inseparably includes the meaning of art and the meaning of recording. Since the 15th century when paper became a common commodity in Europe, artists have adopted it, and the history of paper and ink have been condensed into a bouquet of arts.

In our time, visual artists produce with great diversity of style, a range of experimentation depending on each artist’s starting point, works of unique sensibility, often not at all unexpected, that are surprising in their approaches. The international trend for water-soluble ink, colored or black, to serve in watercolors as an alternative material to more traditional colors, the highly handmade and industrialized papers available to engravers and painters coming from all over the planet, make the approaches of the Art of Ink on Paper one of the most refreshing and interesting approaches of visual artists today.

Paris Capralos
Art Curator