Lot 58

The Collection of Barbara Blackman, Canberra

In the early 1960s Charles Blackman was living between London and Paris and participating in major exhibitions of Australian art including Australian Art - Colonial, Impressionist, Contemporary at the Tate Gallery, in which he was represented by four paintings. In Paris he visited, with Barry Humphries and Arthur Boyd, the Delacroix Centennaire exhibition at the Grand Palais and Delacroix's studio, where he also sought out work of Georges de La Tour. Blackman says, 'I was purposely trying to make my pictures look more French'. 1

The feeling of palpable silence in this dimly lit London interior was created with one eye on Delacroix and de La Tour and the other on Barbara, his wife and muse. The soft grey green atmosphere allows her glowing face to hover, and to resonate with the mystery of the flowers.
The greenish shadows on her right cheek feed into the brightness of her eyes while their sideways glance succeeds in directing the viewer's eye towards the deliberate brushing of fresh green shoots on to her cheek, close to the edge of her helmet-like black hair.

With its red daisy eye and rising stem, this curious flower seemingly acts as a signal to her red lips whose shapely double curve is mirrored in the Peter Pan collar of her blue dress. Like the schoolgirl hat in Blackman's first series of paintings, this collar then heads towards the simple pot on the picture plane that contains the elusive bouquet of whirling shapes on the periphery.

This painting has been hanging for years near the doorway to Barbara's kitchen in Canberra. Perhaps one could also note that Barbara and Charles Blackman collaborated on poems on lips in the book Bizarre in 1964.

Felicity St John Moore

1 St John Moore, F., Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993 p. 86