CHARLES BLACKMAN

Luna and the Art of Mass Delirium, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, 8 December 1988 - 21 March 1999 (not numbered)

M. White Luna Park and the Art of Mass Delirium, Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 1988, p. 28, illus.

Overall good condition. Framed under glass, detailed examination difficult. Some cracks in paint layer, visible along vertical centre line of original weakness in the support. Pin head chip lower left.
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There is a note in Barbara Blackman's diary for December 1951 which could well record the genesis of this painting. She describes 'sitting on St Kilda beach after dinner with the golden sun going down at 8.30 p.m. while Luna Park lights up.' ¹ Having moved to Melbourne from Sydney that year, Charles and Barbara were living in Hawthorn, but would regularly take the tram to the beach at St Kilda.

In The Big Dipper Blackman - as often in his early work - plays out a homage to Sidney Nolan, in this case the Luna Park paintings of ten years earlier. The central circle of the ferris wheel in Blackman's painting may even be an oblique reference to Nolan's Boy and the Moon. Yet even in such an early work we can already see something distinctively Blackmanesque, particularly in the insistent patterning: the parallel lines in the Big Dipper's scaffolding, and the criss-cross, spiderweb lattice, which can be seen elsewhere in contemporary and slightly later depictions of Burley Griffin lights, playground 'razzle-dazzles' or the steel frame of a gasometer.

Despite its apparent simplicity, this is a work of considerable finesse: in the subtle, flickering tonal shifts across the white scaffolding; in the way the background wheel haloes the pink faced thrillseekers in their little square trolley; in the way the several light dotted horizons - lower straight line and humps of railway track - form a kind of schematic landscape.

1. St. John Moore, F., Schoolgirls and Angels: A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 30