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Uploaded 30/9/02
David Blackburn: The Sublime Landscape
David Blackburn, Hart Gallery, Islington, London, 12 September–3
October 2002
David Blackburn: The Sublime Landscape by Charlotte Mullins
with an interview with the artist by Ron Phillips, Hart Gallery,
London and Nottingham, 2002
David Blackburn's exhibition at the Hart Gallery in London coincides
with the publication of The Sublime Landscape, by Charlotte
Mullins. In a long interview with the artist by Ron Phillips, Blackburn
acknowledges his debts to other artists, writers and scholars who
have influenced his artistic career. The exhibition and book together
reveal the exceptional achievements of Blackburn as a landscape
painter who has throughout his career used the landscape as a starting
point for the search for the transcendental.
David Blackburn was born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire in 1939.
He studied at the local art school and four years later won a scholarship
to study textile design at the Royal College of Art in London. He
was greatly influenced by the Austrian artist and scholar, Gerhard
Frankl who helped him to choose the somewhat unfashionable medium
of pastel. As the current exhibition reveals, Blackburn works brilliantly
in this ephemeral medium, making a radical departure from traditional
pastel technique or subject matter.
From the Royal College, Blackburn went to Australia to teach. He
stayed there for three years, mostly in Melbourne. When his father
became ill he returned to England. He travelled to the centre of
Australia and was greatly influenced by the intense Australian light
and the dramatic colours of the land itself. He began to produce
large-scale works, notably The Creation and the Metamorphoses
series. On further trips to Australia in 1971 and 1973, he produced
the Desert and Stones drawings and a further Creation
series. He has continued to travel to Australia and America, and
also to exhibit there.
At the Royal College, Blackburn was a contemporary of David Hockney
and Ron Kitaj. Pop art and Abstract Expressionism were both the
dominant trends of the time. It was Gerhard Frankl who he met in
1960, who probably exerted most influence on him. He encountered
his work in the Reid Gallery in Cork Street. Mullins writes, 'Blackburn
learnt more about colour through his weekly visits to Frankl than
in his three years at the Royal College of Art. Frankl's interest
in the psychology of colour was derived from Goethe's The Theory
of Colour. Frankl was fascinated by complementary colours, and
their power over each other and the viewer'.1
Blackburn recalls the effect of Gerhard Frankl on his work, 'I'd
never seen pastel used to produce such intensity and depth of colour.
It had an extraordinary looseness and freedom, which suggested huge
spaces, shimmering light and a feeling of cold. I found it a revelation.
He became almost a father figure to me. Gerhard was an Austrian-Jewish
émigré who'd settled in London: his family had perished
in the Holocaust. He was an art historian as well as an artist and
he taught me how to look at pictures'.2
In the 1960s, Blackburn's work came to the attention of Sir Kenneth
Clark, whose 'European humanism and his belief in the sanctity of
nature' was in contrast to the prevailing interest in popular culture.
Soon after their first meeting, Clark bought three of Blackburn's
drawings from his degree show. His support and friendship were important
factors in Blackburn's development as an artist, and his interest
in Australia.
In the late 1960s Blackburn began his Creation series. They
were, in due course, exhibited in a line along the gallery wall,
'so that the spectator passing in front of them viewed them in time
as well as in space – almost like reading a story'.3 At the
time Blackburn was working on black chalk drawings. When he placed
them on the floor to examine them he 'began to see rises and falls
in them, visually as well as in their ideas and themes, almost musical…
Then I realised I might possibly combine them in a kind of visual
equivalent of an epic poem, with drawings changing – progressing
– through time… The idea of the Creation developed
out of my acute consciousness of these themes of Life, Change, Development
and Death, and as they evolved I began to see specific stages and
turning points – for example, that human logic would eventually
create life itself, which in turn would destroy man and his world,
but then the whole thing would start again, with light descending
out of darkness'.4
Drawing underpins Blackburn's large works. He works from nature:
trees, roots, and cobwebs. In some works the use of light with pastel
creates a cinematic quality. The Australian light has provided a
complete contrast to his Yorkshire works, 'The darker, Methodist
tradition as a powerful presence'. The artist has an intimate knowledge
of the landscape in Yorkshire where he has walked in the Pennines
for 60 years. He 'decided to use the landscape he grew up with as
a source material for his work while still a student. For him, it
was to embody his emotions, becoming his metaphor for self-expression'.5
The duality of life in Yorkshire, of extreme beauty and industrial
decay, gives Blackburn's work a tension and a depth. He uses an
aerial view from the spectacular Pennines, which emphasis the structural
character of the land. Blackburn's pastel landscapes are among the
finest and most independent of any artist working in Britain today.
Australia, where landscape was the dominant tradition, has exerted
a great influence on Blackburn's oeuvre. In 1961, two years
before his first visit there, he saw New Australian Painting
at the Whitechapel Art gallery, for which Kenneth Clark wrote an
introduction. 'In Australian landscape painting, as in all great
landscape painting, the scenery is not painted for its own sake,
but as a background of a legend and a reflection of human values.'6
Landscape artists Arthur Boyd and Fred Williams both produced work
that changed the way Australians viewed the landscape, and they
did so when the perceptual and figurative art were deemed less relevant
than international movements. Blackburn was particularly influenced
by Williams who reduced the outback to glorious compositions of
dots and patterning. He was probably the first white Australian
to see the landscape in a wholly original, non-European way. The
light and the sense of space in Australia provided a complete contrast
in visual terms to London or Yorkshire. He recalls the intense isolation
experienced in the outback and the utter blackness at night. Uluru,
he describes as the most memorable sight of his life.
The Outback had been a revelation, and suddenly the drawings
became full of glowing reds and blazing oranges, with the sky
taking up half the picture plane. As the feeling of this huge
space, along with a strange dreamlike quality, entered my work
the European concept of foreground, middle distance and background
came to seem irrelevant. I started thinking of certain Surrealists
- Yves Tanguy in particular.7
Years later, paintings such as Central Australian Landscape,
1996 show the extent to which Blackburn became completely immersed
in the Australian psyche, the visual culture. It is a vivid and
remarkable vision of outback Australia.
Blackburn has had a number of significant retrospective exhibitions
and residencies. In 1974 after his return from Australia he was
a Visiting Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. He then returned to
Australia, to Canberra where he was based at the Australian National
University, and then to the University of Melbourne, as the artist
in residence. In 1978 came the Retrospective at Heslington Hall,
University of York, which prompted Sir Kenneth Clark to publicly
describe him as a great artist. In 1981, he was Visiting Professor
at Georgetown University, Washington D.C. In 1989, he had a Retrospective
Exhibition at the Yale centre for British Art, and Granada made
a documentary of his work. Studio International in 1984 published
a review of his Agnew's exhibition, and in 1989 Peter Fuller wrote,
David Blackburn: Light and Landscape for his Yale Retrospective.
Australia and America have been vital for the development of Blackburn's
landscape vision and travel has been vital in the development of
his inner vision. Of his Australian experience Charlotte Mullins
writes:
Blackburn's work is like a diary, and consequently different
things experienced along the way the "diary" develops. Blackburn
may depict metaphysical landscapes that stem from inner visions,
but his experiences of tangible landscape stay with him. That
is why many drawings completed in his Huddersfield studio over
the last ten years – such as Blue Forest in Sunlight,
New South Wales, 1995, and Red Tree and Cliff Sunset,
2001 – have echoes of Australia about them, even though he
only briefly visited the continent three times during this period.
When in Huddersfield, Australia becomes the "other", the dreamland,
half way around the world and present only through memories.8
Mullins' description of the artist's method of working helps to
explain the originality and visual skill that Blackburn has achieved:
Each new work grows organically from the last one completed;
the colours that surround him as he creates a new drawing based
on the last finished work. …Working in the back room of a
large terraced house, with net curtains screening the window,
he has no company save Radio 3, which he says allows him to be
quite meditative about working, almost slipping into a trance-like
state for hours at a time. During this time, each work becomes
a visual manifestation of his inner sensibility, inspired by the
landscape around him and further afield but in essence a working
out of his own inner vision, his place in the world.9
It is right that David Blackburn locates his own work within the
category of the sublime. Like the sublime's most famous English
landscape designer, Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, Blackburn grew
up close to the wild landscapes of Northern England, and both were
profoundly influenced in childhood by such qualities in the environment.
Blackburn's pastels capture that elusive, penetrating quality on
land and in the sky that can never be relegated to the merely picturesque.
Through abstraction, Blackburn purifies the concept of particular
landscape experiences. As the historian and critic Colin Rowe agreed,
too, it is in the territory somewhere between the sublime and the
picturesque that beauty is more readily found. With Blackburn, it
is beauty that mediates with the sublime here, in natural consequence.
1 Charlotte Mullins. David Blackburn: The Sublime Landscape,
Hart Gallery, London and Nottingham, 2002, p.37
2 Blackburn interviewed with Ron Phillips, ibid, p.14
3 Phillips, ibid, p.18
4 Blackburn, ibid, p.18
5 Mullins, ibid, p.45
6 Kenneth Clark, Introduction to New Australian painting,
at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1961.
7 Blackburn, ibid, p.21
8 Mullins, ibid, pp.80-5
9 Ibid, p.37
Janet McKenzie
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