CHARLES BLACKMAN

Sir Leon and Lady Trout, Brisbane
Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane
Private collection, Queensland
Fine Australian Paintings, Sotheby's Melbourne, 19 April 1993, lot 360
Private collection, Sydney

The Red Dress combines many of Blackman's favourite recurrent motifs - the model, the cat, the still life and the delicate hovering butterfly. All of these elements seen within, along with the unusal circular canvas, make for a dreamy, ethereal and calming picture steeped in the European history Blackman often draws from.

In the early 1940s Blackman enrolled in drawing classes at East Sydney Technical College while working as a copy boy at Sydney's newspaper The Sun. A voracious reader and traveller, Blackman collected visual images wherever he went. In this picture the influence of the European Surrealist movement is apparent in the pose of the model, the plausibility of the subject matter and its technical impossibility.

The Red Dress is a beautiful example of Blackman gathering together old familiar themes and incorporating them into a balanced and harmonious picture.