Page 24 - Studio International - September 1965

The paintings of Charles Blackman The substance of dreams

by Al. Alvarez

The story is that the Australian painters became some­ The seductiveness of their paint gathers light and
thing of a craze over here because the English are meaning into itself and makes any simple. literal
hopelessly addicted to literature; painterly values as translation of their images seem peculiarly inadequate.
such bore them. So when a group of artists arrived on As in any good art. the subtlety with which they handle
the scene whose work was not merely figurative but the medium is at one with their 'meaning·. Second. the
whose figures seemed to add up to a new mythology literary content of their work is. deliberately and
the English fell flat. It seemed possible for them once unequivocally, discomforting, disquiet. There seems to
again to discuss paintings without ever quite discussing be some irritant in the Australian context which makes
paint. As a further bounty, most of the -Australians talk every myth and symbol point inwards towards a
excessively well; Sidney Nolan and Charles Blackman. powerful but submerged area of unhappiness. dis-ease
in particular. are by any standards and on almost any and disturbance. Nolan's Ned Kelly, Mrs. Fraser and
subject men of obvious and fluent intelligence. In Gallipoli paintings are less attempts to create an
comparison with the speechless eloquence and bristling Australian folk history or myth than ways of expressing
exclusiveness of most abstract painting and painters. certain sharp insights into an internal world of loss.
the Australians seemed to represent an artistic force that rejection and defiance. In the same way, Arthur Boyd's
was stimulating, new and. at the same time. comforting. spider women. attentive red dogs and goatish lovers
This comfort is an illusion. on every count. First. the are not figures from a mythological landscape; they
three leading Australians-Nolan. Blackman and Arthur are. instead. expressions of a curious aesthetic
Boyd-are all technicians of immense sophistication. sensuality, of the dislocation of extreme sexuality.
1 PHOTO: AXEL POIGNANT
This inturned. upsetting and pre-literary impulse is
particularly strong in the paintings of Charles Blackman.
On one level he seems to be painting again and again
the same two pictures: one is of a woman. grieving.
accusing. partially blind; the other is of children.
playing or lost. dancing or brooding over flowers. The
eyes are always turned inwards. the hands always
eloquent and the centre always is always faces: grim
or rapt or shocked or dreaming; faces behind faces.
and faces behind them. emerging like shadows from
every shape and corner, a cloud of witnesses to the
act of painting. The formal means vary continually: at
times the figures are striped like convicts so that they
solidify through bars of colour or are violently brought
up short against them; or they emerge from an intense
background glow. like headlands through a mist; or
they are painted flat and hard. like some stricken pop
image; or the whole painting may be subdivided into
separate little images. strung together like film-strip.
But always it is the same figures and variations on the
same few situations. It is an art. in short. of obsession.
In gloomier moments. this can seem a limitation.
There is an unusually direct connection between all
Blackman's work and his personality. At times, it can
be a disadvantage. His least satisfying paintings are
those in which he seems totally preoccupied with his
immediate family situation. and unable to interest
himself as a painter in anything outside it. The results
are a kind of marital propaganda. part of a campaign
which is not wholly artistic and which the audience is
never quite made party to. Like all propaganda, these
canvases are slightly overstated. slightly sentimen­
talised; they seem to belong to his conditioned per­
sonality more than to the detached, creative side of the
man. So though they are often alluring and plangent.
they are also. equally often. not quite true.
Perhaps this kind of occasional failure is an inevitable
occupational risk in his style of painting, a failure that
makes the successes possible. He works. after all. in an
area that requires great delicacy and self-awareness.
The usual labels that are stuck over his work are
'lyrical' and 'dream-like'. One distinguished British
critic once reviewed a Blackman exhibition under the
title 'Big, Tough and Tender·. which made him sound
like some boxer with a golden heart. In short, it might
seem as if he were hitching an emotional lift from the
children and lovers and grieving women that make up
his subject-matter. He isn't; his paintings are much
more hard-minded and hard-felt than that. If they are
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