CHARLES BLACKMAN

Charles Blackman, Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 26 June 1960
Australian Modern: Arte Australiana Moderna e Contemporanea e Arte Aborigena, Fondazione Mudima, Milan, Italy, 23 April - 24 May 2002, p. 13, illus.
Lauraine Diggins Fine Art Annual Collectors' Exhibition 2002, Holmes à Court Gallery, Perth, 20 September - 20 October 2002; Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 1 November - 14 December 2002 cat. 62, illus. 

The auto-biographical is never far from the surface in art, breaking through, as it does in The Gentle Touch, the blackness of one of the figures being a metaphor for blindness, when touch replaces sight in communication. Charles Blackman's wife Barbara was turning blind. While the blue of the other figure sets the mood of the painting, its meanings are many and complex, of introspective searchings and relationships, the latter emphasised by the empty surrounding space. The agitation of the brush strokes adds to the figures' isolation, joint and individual, while the presence of only one eye suggests partial sight, both actual and in understanding.

The motif of the two female figures occurs again in Tryst‚ 1959, shown in The Antipodeans exhibition in Melbourne that year, where the silhouette and gesture of communication through the raised hand is shared and the couple's relationship is now illuminated by a golden glow. In Lovers, 1960 in the Joseph Brown Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, the dark figure of the woman is embraced by a man. Here in The Gentle Touch, although painted in neutrals of black and grey, heads are bent in warm endearment. Their central isolation now speaks of a new found harmony through the reverberating lines of the scraped application of background paint.