WHY BLACK? I grew up on a healthy diet of comic books and punk rock graphics, both of which look great in black and white, as well as being easier to print and produce cheaply. The first art which made an impression on me at an early age was the work of Jack Kirby, John Romita and Gene Colan in the black and white British reprints of Marvel Comics. Masters of the fine line, they brought comic book heroes the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Dr Strange and Spiderman alive every week. Later in the 1980's, inspired by the work of Nick Blinko for the record covers of his band Rudimentary Peni, I realised that you didn't need to be academically trained to put your ideas down on paper as long as you created your own style and subject matter. For that reason, I have always tried not to be influenced by anyone else, but thinking about artists whose work I admire has made me realise that the colour black has always been closely associated with depicting the imaginative and strange in all areas of art and illustration. From the Symbolist art of Odilon Redon, Jan Toorop and Max Klinger, to the almost forgotten American pulp illustrators such as Virgil Finlay, Hannes Bok and Lee Brown Coye. From the engravings of Albrect Durer and Gustave Dore, to the work of M. C. Escher and Edward Gorey, black has always been the best colour to use to achieve the greatest visual impact. Indeed there is no better example of this than Berni Wrightson's unsurpassed interpretation of Frankenstein from 1983. But the significance of only using black in art has a history which goes back much further than this. A thousand years ago in China the greatest artists only used black, individual colours were deemed necessary for professional painters, whilst black was for the more celebrated amateur artists who wanted to portray the landscape of the mind, not of the eye. It is this which I have always sought to achieve, to use the power of imagination to produce ideas from my own mind, since I believe that only then can it be said that an artist has created a truly original work of art.