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| Basil Blackshaw:
A dog and two men; courtesy Ulster Museum |
Belfast:
Basil Blackshaw at Ulster Museum
Unlike many
other artists in these turbulent times, Basis Blackshaw's
work displays a refreshing lack of cultural angst. Like
his mentor Cézanne, the immediate world around him offers
abundant inspiration: he would probably agree with Patrick
Kavanagh's comment that all a man could ever hope to know
was the bumps in his own field.
The current
exhibition, in the Ulster Museum, not only demonstrates
the artist's abiding interest in dogs, horses and the
spectrum of rural life but also contains a startling series
of paintings depicting the windows of the artist's studio
where light penetrates and floods around the drawn and
translucent blinds. A window blind is an obstruction to
sight or light and may stand here as a metaphor for the
very act of painting itself, both coming between the viewer
and the world and offering an oblique commentary on what
can and cannot be achieved through art. Blackshaw has
often stressed his lack of interest in the meaning of
a painting as long as the image itself is an enjoyable
ocular experience, but in the window series he encourages
the viewer to look for an abstract meaning embedded in
the very act of painting itself.
It is perhaps
as a painter of the microcosm of rural life that Blackshaw
is best known. His paintings of dogs and horses, and other
animals - there are even a few rabbits in this show -
link him into a tradition of totemism which stretches
back to the earliest cave paintings. Dogs are said to
be the animals closest to humans, with a unique evolved
ability to attune themselves to the psychology of their
masters. Blackshaw manages to both encapsulate the essence
of 'doggy-ness' in capturing the shape, motion and stance
of dogs in paint as well as embracing the relationship
between the dog and its human alter ego. The painting,
A dog and two men, where one of the men is unmistakably
the artist himself, grasps the essence of this relationship
as something that transcends the temporal subject matter.
This is an essential element of Blackshaw's approach to
painting, to obliterate the original image in the search
for something else. In a conversation with his life model,
Jude Stevens, Blackshaw said that he sought to achieve
"a painting whose subject conjured no emotion," but it
is difficult to see how this can be achieved given his
intense immersion in his subject matter which is also
the stuff of his everyday life.
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Basil
Blackshaw: Head of a gentleman; courtesy
Ulster Museum
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There is a
parallel here with the work of Rothko, whom Blackshaw
acknowledges as an influence. In his later field paintings
Rothko sought to squeeze the world out of his work, obliterating
any sign that might make a connection open to assimilation
by society, and making his work impervious to the critical
eye. But unlike Blackshaw, Rothko was attempting to create
a purely emotional experience, by using the interaction
of colour as the unmediated expression of feeling. The
world is erased from these works and art is meant to replace
the world. For abstract expressionism in general, the
rejection of realism was the recognition that modernity,
where "all that is solid melts into air," had destroyed
the cohesion and relevance of traditional representational
painting and left them with no option other than to fall
back upon themselves as the subjects of art. The work
of Pollock, de Kooning and Rothko is the abstract expression
of a self portrait.
Blackshaw
has never crossed this fatal bridge in the ultimate silence
of romanticism. It is the tension between polar opposites
that defines his work. Is it possible to turn painting
into a purely visual experience without involving emotion
and feelings? Is it possible to remove meaning from a
work of art without rejecting any form of representation?
The various portraits in this exhibition are emblematic
of this dilemma. These portraits are embedded within a
discourse and are part of a story there to be read. The
two works Head of a gentleman and Gentleman are economically
constructed studies of the fast disappearing universe
of the 'old decency', the squirarchy now gone to rack
and ruin, desperately holding on to the tattered remains
of a lost world. There is arrogance here mixed with self-pity
and a desperate attempt to keep up appearances. Contrast
these painting with Man with a cigarette, a portrayal
of a self-confident working man at ease with the world,
sceptical and worldly wise.
Blackshaw
finds his inspiration within the confines of a small enclosed
world, his internal exile is self-imposed. Yet within
this world he is never afraid to take chances by giving
the very act of paining precedence over the subject matter.
His painting takes him where he wants to go, even if the
subject matter is as mundane as a broken-down tractor.
Jim Smyth
teaches Cultural Studies at Queens University in Belfast.
Basil Blackshaw:
Paintings 2000-2002, Ulster Museum, December
2002 - May 2003
Article reproduced
from CIRCA 104, Summer 2003,
pp.80-81
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