David blackburn 2016

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David Blackburn is a master of high-keyed colour, presented in rigorously designed pastel paintings of landscape (he himself has described his work as ‘a sort of visionary geometry’), which are associative rather than descriptive in character. Although at first glance it may look abstract, his imagery is firmly rooted in his native Yorkshire, and in his experience of foreign travel, particularly to Australia and America. His paintings give the impression of light streaming through small accents or windows of colour – rather like the experience of looking at stained glass in a sunny church. There are the same feelings of order, serenity and spirituality, the same striving for a timeless beauty.

Blackburn sees the great tradition of British painting as being split between two main approaches, as exemplified by Constable and Turner. Constable is the painter of the intimate and unnoticed, Turner the creator of grand visions; Blackburn views his role as in some way uniting these two impulses. Although, in formal terms, he is fundamentally concerned with metamorphosis, and with creating multiple layers of meaning in his work, he is also involved with painting the mundane (trees or rocks), and imbuing it with a sense of the sublime.

As an artist and a person he is isolated, a loner who has gone against the trend and sought his own path. His mentor was the Austrian émigré painter Gerhart Frankl (1901–65) – who incidentally gave private lessons to Craigie Aitchison, another artist who turned out to be a distinguished colourist. Frankl proved to be a potent example of the artist in revolt against the tide of fashion and contemporary artistic orthodoxies. This moral precursor also showed Blackburn how to use pastels – a move that was to influence his entire development. The use of pastel has frequently been seen as a continental tradition: Boucher, Nattier, Lyotard, then Degas, Lautrec and Renoir. It

has not generally been regarded as an English medium, while the phrase ‘pastel colours’ has an unfortunate connotation in our culture, conjuring up a paint-chart for tasteful home decor. Blackburn has turned this assumption on its head and made of the medium a sensual and potent tool.

An intensely individual artist, perhaps his most important relationships are with the land and the light, and how they can be translated into art. Much of his inspiration has come from the vast open myth-making space of the West Yorkshire moors near his home in Huddersfield. The readymade abstraction of the black grit-stone walls dividing up the moors appeals deeply to him, and the black lines in his paintings are not only these walls, but also cast shadows. They offer a metaphor for enclosure but also a statement about the way landscape is structured.

‘I love the drizzle and mist of the North of England with its sense of decay’, he says, but continental travel has given him a contrasting feeling for immensity and the sublime, especially from flying over these vast landscapes. In the early 1960s he lived in Australia for three years, and returned there in 1971 and 1973-4, with other significant trips since. His first trip to America was in the late 1970s, and he returned to teach there in 1981. Given his status as an independent, it’s revealing that Blackburn visited Europe and Australia before he went to America. This is the diametrical opposite of what other ambitious young artists of his generation were doing – they yearned above all else for America, and made it their first port of call.

The central importance of his trips to Australia cannot be too highly emphasized. The singing emptiness of the desert landscapes taught him how to play with colour and scale – though this was not an immediate revelation, nor was it

David Blackburn: A Search for the Inexpressible

without a sense of personal history. As the art historian Peter Khoroche has pointed out, the colours of Australia came as a confirmation to Blackburn of something within himself he hadn’t fully recognized before, which was doubtless to do with his own character and emotions. But self-analysis is not part of his stock-in-trade. As Blackburn has confirmed: ‘I don’t want particularly to understand what I’ve done. I want to make a beautiful picture.’

The American experience on the other hand was primarily an urban, geometric one, which encouraged the austere side of Blackburn, and restrained his opposing urge towards ambiguity and complexity. So, after 1970, and a group of early dark drawings about origin and change, colour came into his work – and never went away. Blackburn himself described it as walking out of a cave and onto a sunlit plain. Light became his chief subject – light on landscape. There was a new clarity to the imagery and he developed a rare feeling for colour. Blackburn has said: ‘I like the word immanence – touched by the hand of God’, and he interprets it poetically and literally as the way light moves across landscape, illuminating and casting into shadow as it goes.

His imagery is a sort of visual synecdoche – in which the part stands for the whole – a legacy of Modernism in the promotion of fragments, and one of the few ways in which Blackburn conforms to contemporary tendencies. He has made his own artistic tradition, tracing it from the drawings of Claude to the early visionary works of Samuel Palmer and the neo-romanticism of Graham Sutherland. Into that lineage should be inserted the work of the Welsh classicist Richard Wilson, the American Modern Romantics Albert Pynkham Ryder and Marsden Hartley, and generous admiration for Blackburn’s contemporaries Norman Adams and Prunella Clough. The Australian landscape painters Arthur Boyd, Arthur Streeton

and particularly Fred Williams have been equally inspirational, as has Richard Diebenkorn in the American context. ‘They are all artists who searched for the inexpressible and have given us at the same time wonderful images of the real world,’ Blackburn asserts.

Blackburn borrowed from Sidney Nolan the practice of working in series (remember the Ned Kelly images). Nolan also explored what was to become a key theme for Blackburn: the notion of the desert as Paradise. As he says, all his life he’s been looking for the link between the intimate and the vast. One way he has attempted to bridge the gulf is through making multi-part paintings of separate but linked panels. These panels can be read sequentially, as they were made, one leading into the next, or they can be taken overall, and the eye can happily dart at random up and down, from side to side, resting here, flicking there. The panels are also like frames from a film, making this a moving picture, and thus investing the subject with time – that dimension the single image most distinctly lacks – and perhaps a greater veracity through several versions being offered, rather than one absolute.

The painting can be a sort of diagram of the sensations of walking through a landscape, rather than a literal description or evocation of that landscape. Blackburn has become adept at tapping the numinous in the mundane. His work is closely involved with liminality – the area between elements: water and land, land and sky – with the concept of threshold and passing from one state to another. Blackburn’s paintings can suggest transitional states between reality and myth, magic and the spiritual world.

He mostly works on a vertical format, though revealingly he commented some years ago: ‘I always think of the Australian

drawings as horizontals and the American ones as verticals.’ The interweaving of both horizontal and vertical axes in an invisible grid (mostly below the visible surface of colour) provides the underlying structure which makes these paintings so convincing. In the same way that he says of a landscape, ‘I like to find the hidden poetry’, so he invests his paintings with an unseen structure and rich layering of meaning.

His method is first to block out a painting in rectangles of strong abutting colour, stripes almost. This ritual application of pigment helps to put him in the trance-like state he requires to discover the particular imagery of the work forming under his hand. ‘I always start with “mood” and then formal concerns take over,’ he says. Next he draws a kind of grid in black or white over the top of his colour blocks, after which the imagery continues to evolve through a series of checks and balances as he covers over a section with a sheet of paper and lays down more colour to that edge. He masks off the imagery then reveals it to himself; responding to that with a further masking off. There may eventually be a dozen or more layers of colour in a painting, and extensive re-working. Something happens underneath the mask of paper, and Blackburn discovers further truth in a new disposition and alignment. There is a profound sense of purpose here, but also a crucial element of surprise.

Every area of the painting should work formally towards pictorial stability and coherence. Colour and form are interdependent, locked together, but Blackburn will also accept the intervention of chance. For example, if his hand rubs accidentally against the surface, obliterating a passage before the pastel has been fixed, this new set of marks might be welcomed into the composition. ‘I like to let the drawings move wherever they wish, like a two-way conversation – question and answer, but with no end point’, he says. ‘I’m always trying

to create an ideal world by using the forms of the real world.’ The individual motifs thus suggest a multiplicity of things. Trees can also be furrows in a field or roads, a landscape can be a figure or a head, a form can be a mighty rock or a slight leaf; trees can also be figures, or a leaf suggest a coastline.

Let us examine a handful of specific paintings at closer quarters. Desert Orange (1973) is pastel and collage. This is not the full-throated orange of later years, but a paler orange-yellow with odd-edged torn paper incidents, sixteen of them, dotted around the surface. These fragments of collage look as if torn from a colour reproduction of a painting, perhaps from a magazine, which would add another layer or two of potential meaning to the image. (Paint, print and the reproduction’s subject.) There is a strong feeling of collage in Blackburn’s work in general, with so many of the edges of his larger painted shapes resembling torn paper. Here, there is some over-drawing of the collage fragments in black and orange, as well as the presence of black dots, like notes on sheet music or scattered seeds.

Road, Australia (1983), has an orange-pink Francis Bacon-like blush, and is full of parallel horizontal and deflected vertical lines, like light falling through a prism. The black lines give a rather geometric feel to the imagery. Look to the edges and a trace of under-colour will often emerge, like a key to the painting’s emotional palette – here a bright malachite green, and a mid blue. In Trees, Canberra (1985), the orange and black lines have been turned into vectors of energy, indicating both the contours of the land and the outlines of the trees. Touches of bright green appear here and there, and a dusty yellow, but the painting’s livery is mostly orange-black-brown. None of these three paintings has the distinctive white over-drawing which appears so often later.

Although there is a beguiling vividness of colour to the three paintings discussed above, Evening Landscape – Northern Victoria (1999) has a different intensity and positively glows in comparison. It also has the familiar white tracery over its granular surface. The large central shape, like an axe blade or a rift in the landscape opening into a subterranean world, is edged with yellow, as if to suggest light breaking through. Under the surface ochres, blue, green and orange may be discerned. A rift in the landscape or a tear in the veil between worlds – it is as if we are looking into another plane of existence, perhaps parallel with our own. The white tracery is the final layer, which pulls the whole image together, lacing it up or letting it lie loose, accentuating some lines already in place, shadowing forth others, a nervous, allusive, hesitant over-drawing, resolute but instinct with human frailty. This is the final element in the complex Blackburn equation, and although it can simplify a painting, it can also add new references and suggestions.

Our relentlessly knowing society (which actually understands so little) has lost a certain innocence in the way we look at landscape. We have forgotten that we are only guests of the landscape, not its masters. Through the luminous purity of his work, David Blackburn offers us a glimpse of that prelapsarian Paradise. But there is nothing fanciful or imaginary here; to the end, his art remains grounded in the real world. He has always cared about beauty – it’s one of his greatest strengths – and ignored the dictates of fashion. Blackburn sees landscape as a reflection of human values. But he also believes in the need for art (in this case, landscape) to disclose the transcendental significance of its subject. In the breathtaking lucidity of his paintings we experience both intimacy and majesty.

Andrew Lambirth December 2015 – January 2016

David Blackburn’s work began as it continued: throughout his career it remained essentially an exercise in metamorphosis. In this respect his chosen medium, pastel (which, in its dry form, is inherently fugitive) was almost fated. While his shift towards pastel was inspired and encouraged by Gerhart Frankl, his mentor at the RCA, it was also a logical step from previous studies in textile design and printmaking. Blackburn could have developed his dense, yet lucid sense of pastel form in much the same way as his tapestry designs, i.e. building images through an interweaving of individual strokes. By combining his knowledge of textiles and printmaking, however (the latter demanding reversal, addition and/or subtraction and transference), he freed himself from traditional techniques. Instead, he realised depth and form by using his fingertips to blend layer upon layer of pastel – in a manner similar to how old master painters used oil glazes – before interweaving or overlaying his compositions with individual “threads” of accentuating colour.

His earliest works included here, Triptych: Resurrection (no. 1); Five Studies for a Creation (no. 2); That We Should See the Blood of Peter Fechter (no. 3), and Towards the Window, Incident: Study for Metamorphosis Series (no. 4) were made around or shortly after his graduation from the RCA in 1962. Essentially monochromatic, in each work (apart from the Creation studies) he incorporated sinuous lines or staccato strokes of pale yellow, orange and red to enliven dense black layers otherwise relieved only by small rubbed-out or untouched areas of the Arches paper he favoured*. His subsequent travels throughout France, Italy and Germany expanded his knowledge of sacred iconography and form, and he further explored the possibilities of illustrating landscape or organic subjects as polyptychs. Malcolm Yorke later noted that Blackburn developed this particular approach to landscape from his study of Russo-Byzantine icons, which became “the perfect vehicle for Blackburn’s cumulative way of building up his ‘icon of the landscape’”. However, his continued use of serried images, particularly as they shaped his approach to landscape, also stemmed from a deep admiration of Claude Lorrain, whose humanism and interest in scenography elevated landscape from mere device to an actual genre.

Following Blackburn’s successful degree show – in which Kenneth Clark purchased three works and became his patron and advisor – he decided to pursue his career outside Britain. Having applied for several teaching positions in the United States, New Zealand and Australia, in 1963 he arrived in Melbourne, where he eventually took up a part-time position teaching plant drawing and textile design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). He first saw the Australian landscape from the window of a Boeing 707, and later recalled the formative power this “vast, hot, flat country, which most definitely was not English” exercised on his creative imagination. What is more, he almost immediately understood that he saw Australia’s unique power through European eyes and inevitably imposed that system of form and values upon it. Realising this dissonance was Blackburn’s first challenge towards his development as a landscape artist, and one he accepted wholeheartedly.

*Blackburn consistently used Romney and Rembrandt pastels.

a biography by Andrea Gates

1. TRIPTYCH – RESURRECTION, 1962 black chalk 34 x 26 cms 133⁄8 x 101⁄4 ins

2. FIVE STUDIES FOR A CREATION SERIES, 1964 black pastel 25 x 18 cms 97⁄8 x 71⁄8 ins

3. THAT WE SHOULD SEE THE BLOOD OF PETER FECHTER, 1962 pastel 43 x 29 cms 167⁄8 x 113⁄8 ins

4. STUDY FOR METAMORPHOSES SERIES TOWARDS THE WINDOW – INCIDENT, 1967 pastel 34 x 26 cms 133⁄8 x 101⁄4 ins

5. THREE STUDIES FOR AN APOCALYPSE, 1967 pastel 32 x 26 cms 125⁄8 x 101⁄4 ins

6. COASTLINE PORTLAND, AUSTRALIA, 1970 pastel 35 x 27 cms 133⁄4 x 105⁄8 ins

7. TREES EMERALD VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA, 1971 pastel 34 x 36 cms 133⁄8 x 141⁄8 ins

8. STONES COLLAGE, 1977 pastel and collage 36 x 39 cms 141⁄8 x 153⁄8 ins

9. GOLDEN BEACH, 1977 pastel and collage 37 x 39 cms 145⁄8 x 153⁄8 ins

10. DESERT ORANGE, 1979 pastel and collage 37 x 39 cms 145⁄8 x 153⁄8 ins

Blackburn spent his first period in Australia largely around Melbourne and the Victoria coast, and related works reflect both the enduring impact of his first aerial views, as well as his further printmaking studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). In Trees Emerald, Victoria (no. 7), he reserved much of the pure paper, setting the stage for an electric counterplay of black wood and green foliage that appears to float above its surface. Another contemporary work, Coastline, Portland (no. 6) shows his emerging eye for bold colour and form. Using a yellow underlayer to ignite the rich cohesive purple of his background he arrived at an abstract solidity that arguably reflects the influence of contemporary Australian iconography as seen in works by Sidney Nolan.

However, the influence of Australian art and topography collide most evidently in works he made after he travelled throughout the interior, to the salt flats of Lake Eyre through the Outback to Uluru (then known as Ayer’s Rock) and Alice Springs. By far his greatest artistic influence at this time was Fred Williams, a fact Blackburn actually related to the artist when he later met him. In works like Stones Collage, Golden Beach and Desert Orange (nos. 8–10), isolated forms – chords of orange, yellow, ochre and black with notes of blue and lilac – invade or fall upon sandy ground in a land uninterrupted by sky or horizon. And in later works, like Grey Australia (no. 14), Central Australia (no. 15), Landscape, North Victoria (no. 23) and Desert Landscape (no. 29) Blackburn returned to this style using evermore refined layering techniques and even collage to lend his individual forms an almost talismanic power. Using a poetic analogy, he said: “I feel that Australia changed me from an R.S. Thomas to a Les Murray – from gloom to sunlight”. Indeed, long after his time in Australia, he acknowledged this debt to Williams. Equally, it is difficult to see works like Trees, Canberra, Australian Tree Structure, Dry Landscape with Road (nos. 17–19) and Up the Hill (no. 36) without recalling traditional Indigenous Australian art (e.g. the map-like landscapes illustrating Dreaming stories) as well as works by contemporary artists like Rover Thomas.

Blackburn spent the 1970s as a visiting lecturer and artist in Melbourne, and Canberra, and was a Visiting Fellow at Merton College, Oxford before moving to Washington DC in 1980. There he took up the post of Visiting Professor at Georgetown University and began to explore a new genre: the cityscape. American urban architecture and its interpretation by American artists, particularly Richard Diebenkorn, had a decisive effect on his work. Previously, he had based his imagery (at least conceptually) on the horizontality of the Australian Outback. Now, he looked upwards, driven by the inherent verticality of American cities and their native idioms: skyscrapers and grid-form urban planning. Diebenkorn had use of a helicopter to study his Ocean Park series (which Blackburn deeply admired); Williams enjoyed views from a patron’s private plane, and Peter Lanyon actually became a glider pilot to encounter firsthand where the sky met land and sea. While Blackburn was no stranger to commercial air travel, having split his time between Georgetown and the Pacific Coast, he actually looked to Diebenkorn’s work to form his idea of the urban sublime. In works including Landscape Vision: Architectural Quartet (no. 16), Study – Freeway and Aerial Landscape, California (nos. 20–21) he shifted his palette from hot, earthen tones to limpid orchids and cerulean blues, delineating his forms with delicate grid lines that nevertheless pose no restrictions on his glowing, backlit architectural forms.

Towards the end of the 1980s, his American period closed with trips to Canada and the Rocky Mountains, where the high viewpoint and infinite blues of the Blackmoorfoot reservoir inspired Pale Watery (no. 28), a work which could also be considered a “through-the-looking-glass” iteration of landscapes near his native Hudderfield.

11. NIGHT TREES, 1982 pastel 50 x 65 cms 193⁄4 x 255⁄8 ins

12. WOODLAND WITH FALLEN TREE, 1983 pastel 63 x 48 cms 243⁄4 x 187⁄8 ins

13. ROAD AUSTRALIA, 1983 pastel 38 x 31 cms 15 x 121⁄4 ins

14. GREY AUSTRALIA, 1983 pastel and collage 41 x 37 cms 161⁄8 x 145⁄8 ins

15. CENTRAL AUSTRALIA COLLAGE, 1984 pastel and collage 42 x 37 cms 161⁄2 x 145⁄8 ins

16. LANDSCAPE VISION ARCHITECTURAL QUARTET – 4 pieces, 1984

pastel 40 x 33 cms 153⁄4 x 13 ins

17. TREES – CANBERRA, 1985 pastel 38 x 32 cms 15 x 125⁄8 ins

18. AUSTRALIAN TREE STRUCTURE, 1985 pastel 39 x 33 cms 153⁄8 x 13 ins

19. DRY LANDSCAPE WITH ROAD, 1986 pastel 39 x 33 cms 15 3⁄8 x 13 ins

20. STUDY – FREEWAY, 1987 pastel 39 x 34 cms 153⁄8 x 133⁄8 ins

If there was a watershed moment in Blackburn’s career it was definitely 1989. That year his retrospective opened at the Yale Centre for British Art, curated by Patrick McCaughey, perhaps Fred Williams’ greatest advocate, and former Director of the National Gallery of Victoria*. In his opening remarks McCaughey deemed Blackburn part of what he believed to be the one consistent tradition that marked English art: sketching the sublime landscape.

“Palmer fused the fervent vision of Blake with the tradition of the landscape sketch. The result was the visionary landscape in which nature becomes an arena for the imagination as much as an object to be depicted… David Blackburn belongs to this tradition.”

The Yale catalogue included an insightful essay by Peter Fuller, wherein he noted: “despite his stubborn refusal to toe the shifting lines of today’s academies, Blackburn’s images – like all works which are truly original, and not merely novel – belong to a definite, identifiable tradition”. Fuller, however, called this tradition “higher landscape painting”, by which he meant landscape rooted in empirical perception, symbolism and sentiment, if not actual appearance. He also pointed out the influence of Fred Williams, but implied a distinct empathy behind Blackburn’s borrowings, citing their shared appreciation of Chinese ceramics and brush painting, particularly those of the Song Dynasty. Furthermore, Fuller ended his essay by comparing Blackburn to Norman Adams, whom Blackburn deeply admired and called unique in his “big, strong, Biblical mystical vision”. In a later interview with Ron Phillips, he related how he particularly admired Adams’ watercolours, stating: “When I was young they showed me how to transform the landscape from the ordinary to the mystical”.

Interest in his work continued to grow with documentaries commissioned for the BBC’s Northern Lights programme and ITV’s Celebrations, the latter presented with commentary by Glyn Hughes. Now fifty years old, his work was in major collections such as the Albertina; the Ashmolean Museum; Harvard’s Fogg Museum; MOMA, New York; the Phillips Collection, and nearly every major Australian public collection. It was also in 1989 that he met John and Kit Hart, beginning a long relationship with their gallery with several solo shows in Nottingham and London.

Blackburn continued to work in the North of England between 1991 and 1994, largely due to his mother’s failing health and his desire to care for her until her death in 1993. The following year he had solo shows with the Hart Gallery and retrospectives at the Huddersfield Art Gallery and the Kreis Unna in Westphalia. He then spent four months in Australia, where he probably made Blue Forest; Blue Forest, New South Wales, and Green Landscape, Canberra (nos. 25–27). By 1996, however, he was based more or less permanently in Huddersfield, where, for the rest of his career, he continued to make works inspired by both West Yorkshire and his memories of Australia and North America. In some cases, such as New South Wales Coastline with Dark Tree (no. 34) and Blue Green Coastline (no. 37), he even appears to have superimposed memory upon reality.

*Patrick McCaughey was then Director of the Wadsworth Atheneum (1988–1996) and later became Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard and Director of the YCBA.

21. AERIAL LANDSCAPE CALIFORNIA, 1989 pastel 38 x 31 cms 15 x 121⁄4 ins

22. CLIFF BLUE, 1993 pastel and collage 38 x 43 cms 15 x 167⁄8 ins

23. LANDSCAPE – NORTH VICTORIA AUSTRALIA, 1994 pastel 67 x 54 cms 263⁄8 x 211⁄4 ins

24. COLLAGE WITH SYMBOLS, 1995 pastel and collage 42 x 37 cms 161⁄2 x 145⁄8 ins

25. BLUE FOREST – NEW SOUTH WALES, 1995 pastel 44 x 36 cms 173⁄8 x 141⁄8 ins

26. BLUE FOREST, 1995 pastel 45 x 36 cms 173⁄4 x 141⁄8 ins

27. GREEN LANDSCAPE CANBERRA, 1995 pastel 61 x 51 cms 24 x 201⁄8 ins

28. PALE WATERY, 1996 pastel 42 x 36 cms 161⁄2 x 141⁄8 ins

29. DESERT LANDSCAPE, 1996 pastel 42 x 38 cms 161⁄2 x 15 ins

30. HIGH BURNT LANDSCAPE, 1996 pastel 42 x 36 cms 161⁄2 x 141⁄8 ins

31. OCHRE LANDSCAPE No. 2, 1996 pastel 42 x 36 cms 161⁄2 x 141⁄8 ins

32. TREES AND POOL NEAR CANBERRA, 1996 pastel 36 x 42 cms 141⁄8 x 161⁄2 ins

33. DESERT LANDSCAPE, 1996 pastel 36 x 42 cms 141⁄8 x 161⁄2 ins

34. NEW SOUTH WALES COASTLINE WITH DARK TREE, 1997 pastel 44 x 37 cms 173⁄8 x 145⁄8 ins

35. NIGHT COLLAGE, 1997 pastel and collage 43 x 38 cms 163⁄4 x 143⁄4 ins

36. UP THE HILL, 1997 collage 36 x 29 cms 141⁄8 x 113⁄8 ins

37. BLUE GREEN COASTLINE, 1998 pastel 45 x 36 cms 173⁄4 x 141⁄8 ins

38. EVENING LANDSCAPE – NORTHERN VICTORIA, 1999 pastel 44 x 35 cms 173⁄8 x 133⁄4 ins

39. HIGH AERIAL MOORLAND, 1999 pastel 51 x 64 cms 201⁄8 x 251⁄4 ins

40. FROM ABOVE – DESERT LANDSCAPE, 1999 pastel 64 x 51 cms 251⁄4 x 201⁄8 ins

41. HILLSIDE EVENING, 1999 pastel 36 x 44 cms 141⁄8 x 173⁄8 ins

Blackburn’s career and reputation continued to grow in 1994, when he exhibited with the Hart Gallery in Chicago and Prof. Sasha Grishin published a major study of his work, David Blackburn and the Visionary Landscape Tradition, in which he wrote:

“His drawings, with their endlessly ambiguous marks, strike within us certain chords which have a depth of resonance, as rich or as poor as the experiences which have informed our spiritual and artistic lives. Blackburn’s unwillingness to compromise and hostility to easy eye-catching gimmicks have always guaranteed his work a well-informed and dedicated audience.”

A long time supporter of Blackburn’s work, Grishin not only furnished him with a studio during his 1995 trip to Canberra, but also helped organise New Australian Images Through British Eyes: David Blackburn, Mary Husted and John Wolseley, a 1997 exhibition at the Australian National University, Canberra that included works contemporary with Desert Landscape, High Burnt Landscape, Ochre Landscape No. 2, Trees and Pool Near Canberra and Desert Landscape (nos. 29-33). During this 1997 visit, Blackburn may also have made Up the Hill (no. 36), a pastel collage work reminiscent of one of Rover Thomas’s “Dreaming” paintings.

That year also saw Blackburn awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Huddersfield and a review in The Irish Times of a group show at Eigse Carlow in which Brian Fallon wrote:

“The pastels of David Blackburn, many of them based on or influenced by years spent in Australia, show a virtuoso handling of their medium and a very individual colour sense. Though they often have a basis in landscape, they are virtually abstract and stress a delicate linear sense, as fine as filigree, which cuts across and counterpoints the almost tropical glow of the colour.”

The following year Malcolm Yorke published David Blackburn – A Landscape Vision and in 2000 Charlotte Mullins published David Blackburn: The Sublime Landscape, arguably the most insightful, certainly the most comprehensive study of his work. Focusing on works Blackburn produced after his 1994 Huddersfield retrospective, Mullins wrote: “Light fills these drawings as the motif gives way to something more ethereal, veils of mists shrouding the forms below, creating an increased sense of the sublime, the spiritual.” This single sentence perfectly describes works like High Aerial Moorland (no. 39); Hillside Evening (no. 41); Summer Sunlight (no. 43), and Leaves within a Leaf (no. 46).

It is unfortunately impossible to discuss Blackburn’s late work without noting how his illness inevitably affected it. What is extraordinary, however, is just how long he worked despite his ill health. In 2009, although now needing residential care, he agreed to work with photographer and filmmaker Christopher Nunn on a photo essay Falling Into the Day, which captured the artist, not at work but clearly actively engaged in making sense of his world by any means still available to him. Fascinatingly, the last work included here, Landscape Vision Leaves (no. 47), was made the following year. A polyptych, with its roiling biomorphic forms and brilliant stained-glass colour, it differs strongly from the other works included here. Nevertheless, it is wholly of a piece with Blackburn’s landscape vision, wherein form is determined not by time and physical reality, but by his open, generous eye and singular pastel technique.

42. BEACH pastel and collage 52 x 62 cms 201⁄2 x 243⁄8 ins

43. SUMMER SUNLIGHT, 2003 pastel 65 x 51 cms 255⁄8 x 201⁄8 ins

44 MEMORY OF A DISTANT LANDSCAPE, 2003 pastel 65 x 50 cms 255⁄8 x 195⁄8 ins

45. MEMORY OF THE BEACH, 2003 pastel 65 x 51 cms 255⁄8 x 201⁄8 ins

46. LEAVES WITHIN A LEAF, 2006 pastel 66 x 51 cms 26 x 201⁄8 ins

47. LANDSCAPE VISION LEAVES - 4 pieces, 2010 pastel 46 x 67 cms 181⁄8 x 263⁄8 ins

Biographical details

1939 Born 22 June, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, son of Wilfrid and Nora Blackburn

1955 Wins scholarship to Huddersfield School of Art

1959–62 Royal College of Art, London

1962 Meets Gerhart Frankl. Introduced to pastel, and the works of Austrian artists and scholars. Kenneth Clark purchases drawings, becomes patron and adviser

1963 Travels widely in France, Italy and Germany visiting galleries and private collections

1963–6 Visits Australia. Lecturer, School of Art, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Travels in Western Australia.

1966 Completes Creation series. Returns to England

Lecturer, School of Architecture, University of Manchester

Working on Metamorphoses series

1970 Exhibition at Agnews, London. Retrospective at Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield

1971 Visiting lecturer, Department of Architecture, University of Melbourne.

Visits Central Australia

1973–4 Visiting Associate in Fine Art, University of Melbourne

1974 Exhibition at Agnews of Central Australian Drawings

Visiting Fellow, Merton College, Oxford

1977 Visiting Associate, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra

1977–8 Visiting Artist, University of Melbourne

1978 Retrospective at Heslington Hall, University of York

Travels regularly between England, Australia and America

1981 Visiting Professor, Georgetown University, Washington D.C. Begins American ‘architectural’ drawings and Californian ‘beach’ scenes

1984 Drawings purchased for Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.

1986 Exhibition: Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Begins Landscape Vision series

1987 Travels in Canada

1989 Retrospective Exhibition at Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

BBC Northern Lights programme

lTV Celebrations (30 minute documentary)

Commences association with Hart Gallery

1991 lTV Artists’ Lives programme

Featured on BBC radio Kaleidoscope

1994 David Blackburn and the Visionary Landscape Tradition by Sasha Grishin, published

1995 Four month visit to Australia

1997 Visit to Australia for Australian National University exhibition

Awarded Hon. D. Litt by University of Huddersfield

1998 David Blackburn – A Landscape Vision by Malcolm Yorke published

2002 David Blackburn – The Sublime Landscape by Charlotte Mullins published

2006 Landscapes of the Mind DVD by Optic Nerve Productions produced

Solo Exhibitions

2016 Messum’s Gallery, Cork Street, London

2014 Messum’s Gallery, Cork Street, London

2012 Hart Gallery, London




2004 65th Birthday Exhibition, Hart Gallery, London

2002 Winchester Cathedral

Hart Gallery, London

2001 Hart SouthWest, Cornwall

2000 60th Birthday Exhibition, Hart Gallery, London

1999 New Ashgate Gallery, Farnham, Surrey

60th Birthday Exhibition, Phillip’s Auction House, Leeds

60th Birthday Exhibition, Peter Bartlow Gallery, Chicago


1997 Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, Australia.

1996 Peter Bartlow Gallery, Chicago

Hart Gallery, London

Hart Gallery, Nottingham

1995 Retrospective, Djanogly Art Gallery, The University of Nottingham

1994 Stein Bartlow Gallery, Chicago

Hart Gallery London

Retrospective, Huddersfield Art Gallery

Retrospective, Kreis Unna, Germany

1993 Hart Gallery, Nottingham

1991 Hart Gallery, Nottingham

1989 Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Hart Gallery, Nottingham

Goldmark Gallery, Uppingham

1986 Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

1985 Vorpal Gallery, San Francisco

Royal Institute of British Architects, London

1984 Vorpal Gallery, New York

Agnew’s London

1982 International Monetary Fund, Washington D. C.

1980 David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney

Solander Gallery, Canberra

1979 Retrospective, Huddersfield Art Gallery

1978 Retrospective, Heslington Hall, York

1974 Agnew’s, London

1973 Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne

1972 Agnew’s, London

1970 Bradford Festival

University of Swansea

Agnew’s, London

Retrospective, Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield

1969 Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

1968 Oldham Art Gallery

University of Leeds

House of Commons, Westminster

Watters Gallery, Sydney

1967 University of Bradford


1965 Argus Gallery, Melbourne


Public and Corporate Collections

Albertina,Vienna; Art Gallery of South Australia; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Asda Property Holdings Pic; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Australian National University Art Collection, Canberra; Bradford Art Gallery; Bradford and Bingley; British Council, London; British Museum, London; Calderdale Art Galleries & Museums; Carlow Art Collection; Castlemaine Art Gallery; Contemporary Art Society, London; Darwin College, Cambridge; Exeter University; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Fogg Museum, Harvard University; General Electric Company Art Collection; Halifax Building Society; Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Harlow Art Collection; Huddersfield Art Gallery; Leeds City Art Gallery; Mercer Gallery, Harrogate; Merton Colege, Oxford; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Victoria; New Hall, Cambridge; Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; Provident Financial Art Collection; Queensland Art Gallery; Red Bull; Risk Magazine; St Johns College, Oxford; Stanford University, California; Sheffield Art Gallery; The Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester; Trustees of St Thomas’s Hospital; University of Bradford; University of Canberra Art Collection; University of Melbourne Art Collection; University of Leeds; University of Prague Art Collection; Wakefield Art Gallery; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Yorkshire Arts Association.

CDVII ISBN 978-1-908486-99-8 Publication No: CDVII Published by David Messum Fine Art © David Messum Fine Art

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage

and retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher.The Studio, Lords Wood, Marlow, Buckinghamshire.

Tel: 01628 486565 www.messums.comPhotography: Steve Russell Printed by DLM-CreativePhotograph of David Blackburn by Christopher Nunn

www.messums.com

David blackburn 2016

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