Matt black

The second time I went into labour, twelve days earlier than predicted, I was bending over putting a screw into an easel that I had almost finished making as a present from about-to-be-born to about-to-be-ousted. I managed to finish it in time for the presentation the next day and it's had a great deal of use since then.

I'm about to pass it on to a different 2-year-old so this evening I was repainting the blackboard side and relishing the blackboard paint drying from highly glossy to highly matt. It reminded me of being bewitched by Ad Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings at the Abstract Expressionism exhibition I went to four years ago. He removed as much oil as he could from the pigments so that they absorbed light and you have to look really, really attentively to see the differences in the black. Eyes can do it, but that's a conundrum for photography, which depends on light, and my camera got quite confused trying to record the drying blackboard. This is more or less it, though.


Black and white in colour 213