Page 25 - Studio International - September 1965

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1 'lyrical' it is not because they are sweet but because their naked forms. without softening or distraction.
Charles Blackman seen in front
of his painting they depend on a certain purity and directness of This is why his figures emerge almost invariably from
The Change response. If they are 'dream-like·. they have nothing backgrounds that are totally devoid of detail or content
2 vague or self-indulgent or self-hypnotised about them. or commitment. Only by being stripr:ed and isolated
Giff by 1he fence There are. God knows. dreams and dreams. can they take the force of the bare feeling. The images
78 X 54 in.
Oil on Canvas The essence of Blackman's paintings is. I think. not are. in fact. the figurative equivalents of what the
that they are dream-like but that they are like dreams. abstract expressionists would call ·gestures·.
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The 1ransparent table They inhabit a world quite different from that of sur­ The difference. of course. is that the gestures are not
72 X 84 in.
Oil on Canvas realism which was concerned. above all. with the wit, made simply through the paint itself. They are gestures
or whimsicality, of the unconscious. with creating a to which shapes cling, tentatively but persistently, in
landscape art out of the haphazard. baroque connec­ the same way as dreams organize themselves around
tions made by the mind running without restraints. images. or memories suddenly crystallize in a face or a
Blackman's paintings try to get through to a stage below movement or an unpredicted intersection of sensations.
this. a stage before what Freud called 'the dream-work' a kind of psychic touching of finger-tips. It is an art
begins. Blackman. I mean. is dealing with the raw not of observation but of intuition. concerned with the
emotional material which is transformed and made essence not of what is seen but what is felt; an art.
tolerable-in however lunatic a way-by the process in short. of subjective understanding.
of dreaming. He is trying. that is. to find images for Perhaps this is why such a great deal of technical
grief and guilt. loss. persecution and tenderness in concentration seems to go into rendering the elusive-

ness of it all. Blackman paints a great deal and quickly;
at times he even seems to be sketching in oils. But in
his most finished and highly organized work there is
still a feeling of insubstantiality, even an insistence on
it. Those lost children may seem to coagulate out of
the blankness of their background. yet there is always
a sense of the background shining, or soaking,
through them. as though ready at any moment to engulf
them again. The accusing faces emerge from behind
other faces or from the folds of dresses, as if they could
be seen only out of the corners of one's eyes. as if they
were not quite there. Yet this elusive insubstantiality
has its own coherence. Blackman paints as though
the activity were a form of inner exploration. So
however resolutely he tries to catch each intuition
purely and in one. he knows at the same time that no
adult feeling is pure or single. Hence in coming to
artistic terms with each response he is summing up
his life up to that point. Thus in the paintings faces
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