paint black

1. Represent someone or something as evil or harmful. This idiom is most often used in a negative context, as in He's not so black as he's been painted. [Late 1500s]

Example Sentences

As reported in Smithsonian Magazine in 2020, all it takes is to paint black one-half of one blade.

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Gleaming under a fresh coat of white paint, black trim and mist-green highlights, it tugs on lines that creak from the marina’s gentle surge.

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The pro-life groups said they were given verbal permission by a city official to paint “Black Preborn Lives Matter” in front of the clinic, as long as they did so in washable tempera paint, yet six police cars greeted them when they turned up for the protest.

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Still, we don’t want to live in a world where only Black artists are commissioned to paint Black people and only white artists to paint white people, where men are to be rendered by men, women by women, and so on.

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At the same time, he said, the new work “responds to global Blackness, not just a localized California sense of where we are. I wake up, there’s a global pandemic, what do you do, who do you paint? You paint Black and brown people surrounding you. And it turns out those same bodies that have no political, social, demographic relationship to the country that you come from are all indicted within this language of Blackness, this language of skin.”

Read more on Los Angeles Times