ELIZABETH BLACKADDER D.B.E., R.A., R.S.A. (SCOTTISH B.1931) §
KIMONO
£18,000
Auction: 15 March 2017 at 11:00 GMT
Description
Signed and dated 2008, oil on canvas
Dimensions
110.5cm x 110.5cm (43.5in x 43.5in)
Footnote
Exhibited: Elizabeth Blackadder: New Paintings, 2008 - The Scottish Gallery
Note: Elizabeth Blackadder is well known for her images of cats, flowers and still lifes, but to see her as some comfortably predictable painter of the domestic scene would be a fundamental mistake, missing out on the ground breaking radicalism and intellectual acuity of an artist who is no less than a national treasure.
Born in Falkirk, Blackadder studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1949 to 1955 under Robert Philipson, William MacTaggart and William Gillies. Interestingly, as a student on the joint Fine Art course she was also taught art history by the esteemed art historian David Talbot Rice and this surely had an effect upon her development, specifically encouraging a growing interest in other cultures.
A travelling scholarship in 1954 took her to Greece, Italy and Yugoslavia where she was influenced by Byzantine art and mosaics. On a further scholarship to Italy the following year she immersed herself in early Renaissance art but also looked at such contemporary artists as Morandi, whose extraordinarily spare still lifes would later be recalled in her own work. The drawings made on the early Italian journey also reveal the extraordinary talent for draughtsmanship which has continued to underpin her practice over the last sixty years. In 1956 Blackadder married the landscape painter John Houston and together they began to travel extensively, all the time increasing their shared visual vocabulary.
As a developing artist, Blackadder was never averse to new ideas and in particular, despite the fact that she could never be described as an 'abstract artist', gained much from her understanding of the non-figurative revolution which swept through European and American painting in the late 1950s and 1960s. Having in the early 1960s worked extensively in landscapes which echo Gillies, by 1965 Blackadder was looking at new ways of approaching the still life, taking her cue from Redpath and the Edinburgh School but bringing to this her own unique vision which drew on sources as diverse as Mughal miniatures and colour-field abstraction.
Through the 1980s and 90s, as she worked in different styles for each of her chosen genres, her botanical work became more intense and her landscapes ever simpler. At the same time, the still lifes, such as that offered here, adopted a yet more flattened appearance with no perspective whatsoever. The objects were always chosen with care: from popular toys and ornaments to Japanese and Indian prints, floating in their space, often surrounded by a shimmering aura, suggesting an individual presence and character. Similarly, the frequent use of a partial painted frame, in this case on the bottom left of the picture, is a device borrowed from both Mughal and Japanese art, serving to locate the picture in an ambient space within the canvas.
The pink silk kimono pictured here, one from her own collection and often seen in photographs of the artist's studio, also features in other earlier works. Here, set against an ochre ground more like gold in its intensity and richness, it seems almost venerated, like some early Siennese altarpiece. While from one viewpoint, we might see this as a garment hanging on a wall, from another, in keeping with Blackadder's practice, it has a sense of floating in space or being suspended above a vertical plane. Depicted life-size, it also emphasises the importance of this particular painting in the artist's oeuvre as a supreme invocation of the Japanese culture in which she has maintained a lifelong interest.
In this painting, evoked with characteristic eloquence, is the essential spirit of that ancient tradition which had originally re-awakened in Blackadder the understanding that every painting she made was not simply an image but a created object, imbued with the unparalleled power of art to unlock memory and become a unique aid to contemplation.