CHARLES BLACKMAN Australian, B. 1928

Joan Priest Collection, Brisbane; thence by descent

Private collection, Sydney

Reflections by Charles Blackman, Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 14 - 31 August 1966, cat. 40 (label on the reverse)

The original catalogue from this exhibition is to be sold with this lot.

Blue Window, Green Chair was painted during a period of great acclaim for the artist’s work, when he had just returned from five successful years in London. The art critic Al Alvarez wrote of the Blackman’s images of women and children at this time: ‘If they are lyrical, it is not because they are sweet but because they depend on a certain purity and directness of response. If they are dreamlike, they have nothing vague or self-indulgent or self-hypnotised about them… The essence of Blackman’s paintings is, I think, not that they are dreamlike but that they are like dreams… He is trying to find images for grief and guilt, loss, persecution and tenderness in their naked forms, without softening or distraction. That is why his figures emerge almost invariably from backgrounds that are totally devoid of detail or content or commitment. Only by being stripped and isolated can they take the force of bare feeling. The images are in fact the figurative equivalent of what the abstract expressionists would call “gestures”’. ¹ 

It is well known that Charles Blackman’s paintings of women are often reflections of his first wife, Barbara, who, as her vision failed, seemed to him only more perceptive in ways other than seeing. As his friend and biographer Nadine Amadio observes, the women and young girls in his paintings are ‘so often watching, waiting, listening, hearing inner songs. … Some mysterious cycle of reaction is happening. It is another way of listening’.²  The image of a woman by a window has frequently recurred as a motif in Blackman’s personal poetry. Here the young woman is silhouetted, the background window a dramatic amplification of the human image – a window on to her dreams? – and her features delicately delineated to convey inward concentration on things that we as viewers cannot see.

1.  Alvarez, A., ‘The Paintings of Charles Blackman: The Substance of Dreams’, Studio International, September 1965.
2.  Amadio, N., Charles Blackman: the Lost Domains, A. H. & A. W. Reed, Sydney, 1980, p. 39.