Basil Blackshaw, H.R.H.A

Purchased by the present owner in 2003

Belfast, Ulster Museum, Basil Blackshaw, Paintings 2000-2002, 6 December 2002 - 5 May 2003, no.7;
Banbridge, F. E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio, Blackshaw at 80, 12 May - 13 October 2012, no.32, illustrated in the catalogue p.67, with tour to Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, 10 January - 24 February 2013 and Gordon Gallery, Derry, 1 - 30 March 2013

'Blackshaw’s countryside is one that is shaped by human intervention: it is The First Tractor in Randalstown with its now rusty, outmoded technology that is recorded, rather than the pastoral vista of landscape itself.' (Dr Fiona Barber, Blackshaw at 80, exhibition catalogue, 2012, p.27)

Basil Blackshaw’s formidable career has been defined by his response to the rural landscape. Concerned with the lives involved within it and employing a strong, expressionistic approach, his remarkable oeuvre reveals a personal idiom that places him uniquely in the tradition of 20^th century painters in Ireland and beyond. He is an artist who has consciously remained outside art movements since first coming to public notice in his early twenties, and demands to be taken on his own terms.

This understanding is in large part owed to Blackshaw’s rural living, someone who has never lived in any city for more than a few months at a time. Although keenly aware of contemporary reality and artistic developments, it is in the natural environment that Blackshaw finds his subjects, remaining true to his original background. A bona fide countryman, he was brought up in County Down where his father was a horse-trainer, and here a deep familiarity with the countryside and its community was nurtured. As Kenneth Jamison noted early in Blackshaw’s career, he is ‘incredibly sensitive to a wide range of physical experiences – the countryside where he lived; the horses which he exercised and groomed; the dogs he bred… the doggy-men, squat and hunched, who exercised them…his youthful romantic attachments’; these experiences, and ‘a mind already stimulated by literary and visual encounters’ transformed him into an artist (quoted in Blackshaw at 80, exh. cat., 2012, p.19).

So it is that Blackshaw can be described as a poet of the rural, and that in such works as the present, a tractor can become a worthy and meaningful subject of art. Painted in 2001, the sight of this dated motif carries an added resonance yet, at the same time, the painting retains a light-heartedness that is also a central element of his work.  As Dr Barber remarked, ‘Blackshaw’s sense of the rural is never sentimental, nor does it suggest an idealization of something that has been lost’ (Blackshaw at 80, exh. cat., 2012, p.27).

One of the great pleasures derived from Blackshaw’s paintings is the sense conveyed of how he has responded to the subject, achieved through his rich, painterly surfaces – an approach to which Blackshaw attaches paramount importance. ‘With my paintings, there’s always some sort of connection, from the past or something like that. I don’t think the painting should be illustrating anything, it should be working on the unconscious. It should be giving you the feeling that I had, maybe in a different way, but it should be something different than what the subject is’ (the artist quoted in Blackshaw at 80, exh. catalogue, 2012, p.12).

Blackshaw aimed to convey this ‘feeling’ through his application of paint - to evoke a sensation in the viewer before the subject. Thus we see the significance in the present work of the broad brushwork, the dripping paint, the scrawled text and the applied collage - a demonstration of how the artist had 'pushed the boundaries of his techinique to new limits' (S. B. Kennedy, Basil Blackshaw, Paintings 2000-2002, introduction to exh. cat). This expressionist approach has been fundamental throughout Blackshaw’s carrer, seen his seminal early work, The Field, from 1953 (National Museums Northern Ireland). It depicts an area he knew well, ‘I loved it and lived in it and beagled in it after hares’, (Blackshaw in conversation with S. B. Kennedy, 31 May 1976), and the impact of this landscape on the artist is forcefully conveyed through the energetic and dynamic paint surface. This approach would inform the direction of his painting to follow, carried into the 21^st century with the present work.

The centrepiece of his recent exhibitions in 2002 and 2012, The First Tractor in Randalstown can be viewed as the culmination of Blackshaw’s lifelong engagement with rural subject matter bearing the qualities – paint surface, a reflection on man’s presence in the countryside, characteristic humour – that have established Blackshaw’s reputation. Perhaps his most remarkable achievement is that although focussed on a rural community in a remote Northern Ireland, his dedication to the subject and the weight of his convictions have demanded a wider recognition and engagement beyond the boundaries that have defined his work.