CHARLES BLACKMAN

Throughout Blackman's oeuvre there is a recurrent motif of the doubled head: from the split-faced carnival mirror portrait of The Twins (1954) to the Through the looking glass and  Janus-face Alice with teapot crown  (1956) of the Alice series to the melancholy couples of the 1960 Suites and beyond.

In the present work two strong, brightly-lit and deeply shadowed profiles emerge from a deep blue-green ground. The bold, heraldic crimson of the body beneath is a feature of the artist's work from the late 1950s, but the inclination to redness was certainly reinforced by various impressions during the Blackmans' European sojourn of 1961-66: the Mark Rothko retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1961; paintings by Carpaccio and Titian in Venice; even young Auguste Blackman's red London school blazer.

The painting is a fine example of what Franz Philipp called Blackman's "gentle dialogues between figures and shadows",¹ though this work is particularly haunting. Identifiable neither as lovers, nor as confidantes, nor as mother and child, the two heads are so similar as to suggest either a stop-motion/Edward Muybridge photograph, or a 'double-take' reaction, or even a split psyche, a divided self.

1. The Nation, Sydney, 29 August, 1959, p.19