JOHN BLACKBURN | SEVEN DECADES OF PAINTING
“White is the whole reason for me painting”.
So says John Blackburn, who is celebrating his ninetieth birthday with his seventh exhibition at Mayfair gallery Osborne Samuel (September 8 – 23).
John Blackburn, Black L on Brown/White Square Bottom, 1964. Courtesy of Osborne Samuel
The first of these was in 2007, a year after Blackburn re-emerged from obscurity after a 28-year hiatus from the art world, during which the artist had followed another career path to support his family, after a successful early career in both New Zealand and the UK.
White is definitely the predominant colour in his palette, but there are plenty more besides, of course, in various forms – largely abstract, generally allusive – emerging from his works, as you can see from this retrospective spanning his whole career from the 50s. Paint is often slathered over objets trouves (bandages, strips of textile, rusted bits of metal); in some series the work is scorched and hazed with smoke.
He is very much an outsider artist, part of no school or group, citing Alfred Wallis and Derek Jarman as influences. Another was Jean Fautrier, and in particular his harrowing ‘Otages’ series, which inspired Blackburn’s 1970’s ‘Hostages’.
The Catalan artist Antoni Tapies isn’t mentioned in Dr Ian Massey’s excellent essay on Blackburn in the exhibition catalogue; if the Catalan artist wasn’t an influence, he and Blackburn were certainly working along parallel lines.
‘Essentially the work is metaphoric’, concludes Massey in that essay, ‘for Blackburn is deeply attuned to the nature of the spiritual within the corporeal, to the ways in which all material things resonate with personal or collective meaning and speak to us of the poignancy of the past within the present, of the elasticity of time and memory.’
Osborne Samuel will be at Stand 5 at British Art Fair, showing work by Sir Terry Frost, Lynn Chadwick, John Craxton, Elisabeth Frink, Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, Winifred Nicholson, John Piper, Alan Reynolds, William Turnbull and Keith Vaughan. The John Blackburn exhibition is at their 23 Dering Street Gallery until September 23.