CHARLES BLACKMAN

There is something chameleon like in Charles Blackman's openness to outside influences. A painterly Zelig, he will often adopt the mores of those he admires or with whom he is in company. This large, vibrant work was painted during the period when he made regular painting excursions to Williamstown with John Perceval, Arthur Boyd and Hal Hattam, and it is markedly Percevalesque in treatment. Felicity St. John Moore acknowledges Perceval as 'a catalyst to loosening up [Blackman's] technique'. ¹

Broad and wild, Williamstown presents a spatially complex, ambiguous maritime array: a chaos of looming and twisting hulls and smokestacks and sails. Despite the thick, carefree sweeps, dots and squiggles of pigment, Blackman nevertheless maintains his 'innocent eye', his child-like fascination with local details: the distant city skyline, red marker buoy and grey bollard, seagull and swans.

Despite the different subject matter, the present work has a clear and interesting relationship to the contemporary Alice series, in the weird attenuations, the weightlessness of things, the swirling, turbulent entropy.

1. St John Moore, F., Schoolgirls and Angels: A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Charles Blackman, Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, 1993, p. 19