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Though he understood that, scienti cally, black was the “absence of all color,” Motherwell employed black as a main character of his paintings, prints, drawings, and collages. Throughout his career Motherwell deliberately restricted himself to a palette of black and white, sometimes complemented by blue, yellow ochre, red, and green. Black held different meaning for Motherwell throughout his lifetime; sometimes it represented sadness, while other times it meant serenity and contemplation.
As part of the Abstract Expressionists, who created gestural, spontaneous work, and valued personal expression, Motherwell held a deep understanding of the evocative power of color and abstraction. His
expressive works resulted from automatism, a method of spontaneous creation that flows, unedited, from the artist’s subconscious. He was also inspired by Japanese Zen concepts of simplicity, calligraphy, and minimal colors.
Motherwell was an accomplished printmaker, using the medium since the 1960s, when advances in printmaking allowed shapes, gestural marks, and variations in tonality. In his printing practice Motherwell was especially concerned with achieving rich tonalities of black, using long acid etchings
for his printing plates. He was able to achieve spontaneity in etching by using lift ground techniques, where marks are determined by brushing sugar syrup loosely onto an etching plate.