Learning to See in the Dark
What Ad Reinhardt's black paintings teach us about fear, presence, and possibility.
For the last decade of his life, Ad Reinhardt painted almost nothing but large black canvases. At first glance they seem empty—just black squares. Many viewers wonder what all the fuss is about.
But Reinhardt wasn't painting black. He was painting the experience of learning to see.
Stand before one of his paintings for a few moments and very little happens. Stay longer, and the darkness begins to open. Black gives way to hints of crimson, blue, and green. Shapes emerge where there seemed to be none. The painting hasn't changed. Your seeing has.
I wonder if life works the same way. We spend so much energy trying to escape the dark—or imagining everything that might go wrong—that we rarely stay still long enough for our eyes to adjust. We rehearse worst-case scenarios about our health, our children, our communities, and the future. Our minds are wonderfully creative, but they are unreliable fortune tellers.
What if we asked a different question? What if something beautiful is quietly taking shape? What if this uncertainty is making room for wisdom, this grief deepening our capacity to love, this darkness holding colors we simply cannot see yet?
Reinhardt's paintings never deny suffering. They simply refuse to believe that darkness is empty. Hidden within it is the quiet possibility of grace—revealed only to those willing to remain present.
Perhaps that is the invitation: not to live captive to imagined futures, but to inhabit this moment with patience, courage, and curiosity. We cannot know what tomorrow will bring, but we can choose whether fear or hope will shape the way we see.
Maybe Reinhardt wasn't painting darkness at all. Maybe he was asking whether we have the patience to discover what the darkness has been holding all along.
The psalmist may have said it best: "Even the darkness is not dark to you." Perhaps the darkness has never been the problem. Perhaps our seeing is still unfolding. And if we linger a little longer, we may discover that what first appeared black has been quietly shimmering with color all along.
