Charles Blackman

A younger contemporary of Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Joy Hester and Sidney Nolan, Blackman emerged during the fifties as an artist whose pictures achieved a rare and extraordinary degree of poetic reality. In London, where he lived from 1961-66, his paintings were described as ‘big, tough and tender’, an epithet that stuck for some years for Australian art in general. Blackman’s work attracted to his side some of the most distinguished figures in the art world, including Sir Kenneth Clark. In 1966 Blackman decided to forgo the attention of British critics, poets and intellectuals and return to his own country and to draw from the Australian environment the essential character of his art – its strong contrasts of dark and light, hard-felt emotions and genuinely large size. The combination of these qualities with his intimate human imagery underlines the urgent and haunting effect of his pictures.
 
In bringing together paintings and drawings from forty-two years of Charles Blackman’s career, this exhibition allows us to see the development and constant renewal of his art as it unfolds within a consistent personal vision. The exhibition takes place in the artist’s sixth-fifth year and is the first survey of his art. Its initiation by the National Gallery of Victoria is especially appropriate, since it was in Melbourne, where he came to join what he regarded as his kindred spirits, that Blackman began his career as an artist and painted many of his best known images. Moreover, the National Gallery of Victoria was one of the first public galleries to acquire his work. The exhibition also coincides with a renewed interest in Blackman’s work among younger artists who are discovering its relevance to their own concerns with expressing ideas and feelings through figural images.

Sourced from: Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, 1993