Page 27 - Studio International - September 1965

Charles Blackman

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ings. Consider, for example, his most constant theme:
blindness. The unseeing, indifferent, stricken women
who haunt nearly every canvas are usually explained
away by his wife's near-blindness-an explanation
which nearly covers the obsession, the guilt and also
the slightly masochistic undertone of much of his work.
It seems to me. however, that the preoccupation goes
deeper into the technique than that. In some curious
way Blackman seems to be painting blindness not as
a subject but as the beginnings of a style-as though
he himself were blind. He presents visual images. that
is. with an uncannily heightened awareness of the
other senses. The colours glow and mingle together
until touch and smell themselves seem to become
visible. Perhaps this is a secondary reason for the fact
that his figures emerge from such anonymous back­
grounds; by lacking a long-distance context each in
itself becomes. as Blake said, 'an immense world of
delight enclosed by your senses five·. The sensuousness
of his paint is both a compensation for blindness and a
transformation of it.
I suggested earlier that there is a peculiarly direct
connection between Blackman's personality and his
work. But this is a question of something beyond his
tendency to paint out of his immediate problems. It is
the qualities of the man himself that control and sustain
his painting. He looks like an alert, highbrow jockey­
someone once called him the 'Scobie Breasley of
Australian art'-and everything he does is channelled
by the same frail. bristling energy, observant, witty,
undercutting. It kept him going while he bummed
round Australia, picking fruit, cooking in restaurants,
visiting other artists, sketching; it drove him to reorgan­
ize the moribund Contemporary Art Society of Australia
in 1954; in the tighter, clubbier London art world it has
made him the pungent-or punchy-centre of the
Australian exiles. But this energy is expressed most
the children in his pictures were already grieving over perfectly in the painting. It stops him relaxing into any
the loss of their own innocence. easy answers and provides an ironic. inventive counter­
Yet however inward the subject-matter the final balance to any oversimple lyric sentiment. Though his
success of Blackman's paintings depends, obviously, work may depend on the purity of his responses and
on the quality of the painting itself. It is ultimately the complete painterly assurance with which he
through the seductive sophistication of the texture of expresses them. the purity itself is the complex, inclu­
work, rather than through any literary overtones. that sive, precarious gift of a mature artist, a personal
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he conveys the complexity of what he is getting at. language with infinite shades of meaning and infinite
The texture. that is. is part of the meaning of the paint- possibilities for new life and change.
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