Adrian Landerīlue was the most expensive colour to produce throughout history, he says, because it occurs so rarely in nature.

“They are very pure black, but the real function of the way that it works is that light goes into the surface and then is trapped by bouncing around between the spaces of the nanotubes and it never escapes, so that 99.9996 percent of all visible light that enters the surface that’s got vantablack on it never comes back to the eye.”ĭavid Coles Photo: supplied / c. “This is a pigment, through a system called vapour deposition in a very controlled environment, they literally grow these nanotubes … we can fit a million of these tubes that are sort of sticking up like a little forest on a surface, into one square centimetre. “Vantablack is a pigment only in the sense it is a colouring material that is indivisible, it’s insoluble, dyes are soluble. Vantablack is the most modern and darkest black ever created he says. He would create blues, very subdued blues, by mixing vine black with some white, just using the blue undertone to create these referred blues.” The most famous for doing this would have been van Dyck the Dutch artist who worked for the British royal court.

“When that’s charcoaled, it has a very slight blue undertone which is very noticeable when you mix a white with it. Vine black is a charcoal black, derived from grape vines. “You walk into this room with rows of shelves and 200 of these lamps burning away, it’s almost a spiritual experience walking in.”

They make lamp black the same way they did almost five centuries ago, which is ceramic bowls filled with different types of oils because the oil will change the nature of the black and then they hand make the wicks and then they collect the soot. Kobaien, Japan’s oldest ink manufacturer, has been in the one family for fourteen generations. “Carbon black, or lamp black, is a very important colour because it is ridiculously intense, very, very strong, very rich and especially in oil colours a very saturated colour that allows artists to get deep receding shadows in paintings where they are painting an interior or a portrait of an artist in an interior.”Ī company in Nara, Japan till makes lamp black the traditional way, Coles says. Lamp black is made from soot mixed with an oil. Listen to the full interview with David Coles

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