Charles Blackman

Private collection, Melbourne

There is a fine hair line crack upper right, otherwise this work is in good condition.
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Towards the end of 1954, Charles and Barbara Blackman visited Joy Hester and Gray Smith at Avonsleigh, near Emerald in the Dandenong Ranges. They ended up renting a house and staying six months, 'the first time I ever in my life I actually lived in the country.'¹  This first rural idyll was immediately followed by another, a six week sojourn in Queensland house-sitting for friends – the poet Judith Wright and her husband Jack McKinney – at Mt Tamborine, south of Brisbane.

After the angular geometries and oppressive perspectives of the 'Schoolgirl' series, the Avonsleigh and Mt Tamborine landscapes are refreshing in their extension, their openness. There are still shadows – many of the works from this period are twilights and nocturnes – but here the mood is altogether different, the chiaroscuro softer, gentler, crepuscular. Inspired by Avonsleigh's horticultural industry, with its fields full of flowers, in works such as Stargazer (1955, private collection) and Flowers on the hill (1955, private collection), Blackman presents broad, gestural (even abstract expressionist) fields of daisies, daffodils and lilies: quick, light touches of white and gold and pink and blue dancing across the full width of the composition. Even the prosaic, mechanical country realism of windmills – as seen in the present work, in Man and windmill (1955, private collection) and in Moonlit hut, Tamborine (1956, collection of the artist) - is subverted by the artist's poetry, with the machines' sails transformed into flower petals and pinwheels.

In Girl with windmill, Blackman is still addressing what critic Alan McCulloch perspicuously identified as 'the main problem – that of one or two figures isolated in unusual surroundings... one that Mr Blackman has solved many times before.'²  Here, however, the figure of the golden-haired girl is not pursued or threatened, but rather calm, still and self absorbed. She is probably a portrait of Blackman's wife Barbara; she is certainly a forerunner of Blackman's Alices, who first appear the following year, 1956. The artist has constructed the picture from a series of truncated wedges or triangles: the sky above the angled horizon; the road running up towards that horizon on the right; the six arms of the windmill and their open-scaffold tower in the centre; even the girl's a-line blue dress. Despite a certain sense of dreamy isolation, the Barbara-Alice sleepwalker is seamlessly integrated both into the picture plane and into the landscape.

The present work is a major painting from this key early period and is very distinctive in having a primary support of composition board; most works from this time were painted on sheets of lithographic paper and subsequently laid down.  It may have been one of the Tamborine and Avonsleigh paintings included in the artist's Melbourne exhibition of August 1956.

1.  Charles Blackman, quoted in Thomas Shapcott, The art of Charles Blackman, London: Andre Deutsch, 1989, p. 18
2.  Herald, 3 November 1954