An obituary by Holland Cotter for The New York Times.

If these images occupy positions on the beauty side of Mr. Black’s 20th-century equation, the horror component had at least equal weight. It included images of three Latin American dictators, a Shell Oil refinery and a portrait, excerpted from a photograph, of a Roman Catholic cardinal in deep conversation with Joseph Goebbels.

Mr. Black himself refrained from any obvious passing of judgment. The players in “Oneirology,” including Orpheus, Andy Warhol and three giraffes, commingle as if at a party. They are all overseen by a guiding star in the form of a glowing image of the disco diva Grace Jones’s smiling lips.

Rafael Leonardo Black was born on Jan. 6, 1949, on Aruba, a Caribbean island that remains Dutch territory. He started drawing as a child, encouraged by his parents.

When asked, in an interview published for his 2013 show, whether he had been named for Italian Renaissance artists, he said that “Rafael” was in honor of an uncle, Rafael Hodge, and that “Leonardo” came from “Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the first person of color to became president of the Dominican Republic,” adding, “My mother admired him.” (People who knew Mr. Black called him Ray.)

Supporting himself with various jobs — he was a typist in a law firm, a salesman at Gimbels and then at Macy’s, and a hospital receptionist — he continued to read voraciously. Books on comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell especially interested him, as did the work of the African-American poet, novelist and essayist Ishmael Reed.

Always his life revolved around his art. He lived alone in a small apartment that doubled as his studio in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. There he devoted himself to his complex, labor-intensive drawings, which were often years in the making.

Jim Dwyer of The New York Times visited Mr. Black at the time of his Naumann show. “For more than three decades, Mr. Black, 64, has made a portal to the world in dense, miniature renderings of ancient myth and modern figures,” Mr. Dwyer wrote. “Until recently, few people ever saw his work because he had almost no visitors.”

“Day after day, year after year,” he continued, “he labored like a monk.”

Speaking of his art to Mr. Dwyer, Mr. Black said he had “just never made the effort to sell it,” although, he added, “I’ve always done it since — well, I guess, since I’ve known myself.”

He is survived by a nephew, Jean Murphy.

Mr. Black’s first New York solo show, titled “Insider Art” — a reference to his profound knowledge of art history — proved to be his last. Most of the pictures sold, earning him more money than he had ever had. He contemplated traveling back to Aruba, but never did. He preferred his daily studio routine, a painstaking mode of production that meant that he left little new work behind.

“What I do is read and make my pictures,” he told Mr. Dwyer. “People who become what are called artists don’t stop. There’s a saying: ‘Everybody writes poems at 15; real poets write them at 50.’”