Elizabeth Blackadder Some things you may know about Elizabeth Blackadder: she paints flowers, cats and floaty Japanese trinkets; she is the Queen’s Painter and Limner in Scotland; she has been doing what she does for a long time, and was married to painter John Houston for over 50 years. Most people are aware of Blackadder’s work, and many people appreciate it. But its overriding gentleness and domestic subject matter cause it to fall often into the category of cosy, commercial art. The National Galleries of Scotland aim to put this right in the year of the artist’s 80th birthday, by giving her top billing in its prestigious summer programme. This is the first time since 2007, when Harry Benson featured at the Portrait Gallery, that a Scottish artist has enjoyed the privilege. If it’s not too rude a thing to say about a lady, Blackadder began her career way back in the history of 20th century Scottish art. A student of the Fine Art course taught jointly by the university and art college in Edinburgh, she learned about Byzantine art from the renowned Professor David Talbot Rice, and was taught painting by none other than William Gillies. Blackadder’s art has not changed dramatically over the past 60 years; she is always developing, but the basic principles remain the same. Objects are brought together in harmony, closely observed but not real; they are floating memories of themselves, detached from physical laws of nature. Take Flowers And A Red Table, for example, painted in 1969 after a trip to New York where Blackadder saw the works of the great Abstract Expressionists. The canvas is an almost unmodulated field of scarlet. Three objects are lined up at the lower edge; this is no cosy still life, but a Rothko-esque experiment. Most Ab-Ex men would have run a mile from recognisable vases of flowers, but Blackadder has always been undeterred by such macho art world bêtes-noirs. Perhaps it’s the same piece of furniture in Self-Portrait With Red Lacquer Table, painted almost 20 years later. The flat field of colour dominates the picture, while the artist, sitting beyond, recedes in shades of black and white. The Japanese interior in which she sits is like a piece of origami, folded and held in delicate, fragile tension; a breath of wind, it’s easy to imagine, would scatter the lot. Blackadder’s still lifes can, I think, be best understood after seeing her Japanese still lifes of the 1980s and 1990s. These impressive large watercolours are filled with neat collections of objects and shapes, some gilded, others outlined in watery black brushstrokes. They’re like stored memories, reordered in her head; this is what she does, a little less transparently, in her table-top still lifes. The centre, in Blackadder’s compositions, gets no more attention than any other part. Drawing from both the old Japanese and the new abstract expressionist traditions, she loves to use every part of the canvas in equal measure. So, in Cats And Orchids of 1984, a crowd of green leaves pushes the flowers and cats off the very edges of the page. It’s a deceptively sophisticated composition, just as Elizabeth Blackadder is a deceptively sophisticated artist. She is content to just keep on painting, endlessly inspired by the curiosity shop that is her studio, and let others do the talking. Hopefully this exhibition will get the world talking, about an artist who can make Scotland quietly proud.
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