David Blackburn MBE (June 22, 1939 - March 23, 2016) is a British artist living in northern England. He works almost exclusively in pastel media and is well known for his eye-catching landscapes.
Video David Blackburn (artist)
Early life and education
Blackburn was born in Huddersfield in 1939 to Wilfred, a painter and decorator, and Nora. As an only child, Blackburn spends his time painting and walking on the ground near his home; this is the period that he holds as his help to develop a 'strong inner vision' which is the main characteristic of his art. After obtaining a scholarship to a local grammar school, Blackburn studied at the Huddersfield School of Art for several years. His friends included playwright David Halliwell, whose game Little Malcolm and his Struggle against The eunuchs were loosely based on students attending lectures, and the children's television personality of Wilf Lunn.
On the advice of his teacher, Blackburn successfully applied for a place at the Royal College of Art, where he studied from 1959-1962. Although originally he was based in the Textile Department, the students were encouraged to move between the areas, and Blackburn quickly found himself drawn to the challenge of a smoother landscape art, a somewhat outdated subject at the time. Many of Blackburn's contemporaries, including David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj, gained critical recognition for their innovation in what will soon be known as Pop Art, or 'Royal College of Pop'. Blackburn was not moved by the pleasant aesthetics of such trends, preferring a quieter view of landscape artists such as Gerhart Frankl and Prunella Clough, who used to be a huge influence and personal friend.
Maps David Blackburn (artist)
Careers
After leaving college, Blackburn went to Germany, France, and Italy for a year before accepting a position at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. During his time in Australia, he was greatly influenced by the work of Fred Williams, who helped him develop a space understanding away from the 'foreground European concept, medium range and background', which he increasingly regarded as 'irrelevant'. After several years living between England and Australia and giving lectures at institutions such as Manchester University and the University of Melbourne, Blackburn received Visiting Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, an experience he described as a 'pleasant interlude between trips'; acquaintances including Rex Richards and W.H. Auden.
In 1981, Blackburn took a position as Visiting Professor at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. At this point it becomes affected by the vertical perspective of the American city landscape, and begins experimenting with imaging techniques and electronic collages. However, after a brief period of experiment Blackburn realized that his 'inner life is based on the natural world, not the city', and then begins a complicated and long-term sequence of transcendent pastel images known as the Vision Scenes series. In the early 90s, Blackburn returned to Huddersfield to care for his mother, who died in 1993. Since then, he has remained in northern England, where he continues to observe the landscape and work on his visionary panel project.
Blackburn was appointed Member of the Royal Order of the United Kingdom (MBE) in the 2015 New Year Award for art services.
Work
One of the earliest people who recognized Blackburn's talent as an artist with major significance was the eminent cultural theorist Sir Kenneth Clark, describing it as "a very special artist - a great artist who has not gained enough recognition". Other early supporters include Humphrey Brooke, secretary of the Royal Academy, and war photographer Humphrey Spender. In the following years, Blackburn has been the subject of three documentaries, the Celebration
Blackburn's approach to landscapes is to discover what he describes as' hidden poetry 'or' visual magic ', in which recognizable objects, such as spider webs or leaves, can' turn [ed] into something richer and more strange. '. Blackburn's works are recorded for the way they play with the concept of scale and perspective; often you can observe what appears to be fragments of rock or sand, when the scale suddenly shifts to show the big picture of topography. Combined with Blackburn's interest in capturing the transformation process is the desire to 'reveal the inner vision in terms of external reality', pursuing the majesty that lends his work 'the ineffable beauty of inner radiance', to quote Sister Wendy Beckett.
Part of Blackburn's ultimate achievement is his pastel mastery, a substance known to be difficult to control. His interest in the media was intrigued by his intense reaction as a young man with the art of Gerhart Frankl, who used it as a means of conveying the clarity of his original landscape in Austria. Blackburn has praised the effects resulting from the uncertainty of his chosen medium, saying that 'I can get something completely unexpected and even magical', and describes it as a material that allows 'forms to continue to appear and then disappear'. The mastery of the Blackburn pastel is considered unequaled in contemporary art, with criticism of Peter Fuller observing that he has developed 'a technique that is not only fully in line with his aesthetic purpose, but also, as far as I know, unique.'
Blackburn's earliest pieces to garner critical attention were Creation (1963-1966) and Metamorphosis (1966-1968), completed when he was in his twenties. Both of these works consist of a number of small images that are mostly symbols depicting a group of ideas defined by Blackburn as 'Life, Change, Development and Death'. After being introduced into the bush, however, this broader philosophical quality began to be discarded for the techniques involved with the spatial void of the Australian landscape. New life color blocks that take most of the canvas begin to emerge, along with less literal environmental representations; often in these works, trees and stones are advised, just for the image to turn into a close-up micro from the ground or a sweeping air vista above, a trend that will continue to characterize defining its artistic vision.
After moving to America in the early 80s, Blackburn's art responded to the largely urban environment in which he found himself. His work begins to assimilate more diagrammatic structures, suggestive blueprints or architectural plans, and his central image is often framed in devices that resemble glass windows. Blackburn describes his current interest in capturing what he defines as the 'visual geometry' of the urban landscape, using vertical impulses from skyscrapers to explore new methods of representing contrasting spaces with empty Australian bush beds. In the mid-80s this new style expanded to include curious fragments of collage material, lending his work something 'quality science fiction', citing the art historian Charlotte Mullins.
However, this innovation proved somewhat temporary, and in the late 80s Blackburn began to synthesize his skills into the overall project of the Landscape Vision series. These works consist of a number of small panels carefully arranged to create a larger whole. The connections between individual images are often very skewed, encouraging viewers to trace the transverse and nonlinear transverse lines, praising the metamorphic aesthetics contained in each individual image. Many of the most recent pictures are quite bleak in tones and evoked gloomy moorland near Huddersfield. However, Blackburn is skeptical of being considered a northern artist, arguing that such views suppress the work to be perceived as 'isolated', 'not worldly' and 'grim' at the expense of other qualities. In the series of Landscape Vision, as in all of its art, Blackburn continues to foster a response to the landscape in which its pictorial elements are reshaped into magical or transformative structures. The sense of immanence in his work is a way of giving expression to a personal vision in which 'the relationship between the unnoticed and the infinite' is regarded as the central means by which the artist can respond to the world in which he lives.
Bibliography
- Simon Armitage, 'Somewhere To Believe In', Modern Painters 17 (2004), pp.Ã, 105-107.
- Peter Fuller, 'David Blackburn: Light and Landscape', catalog of essays, Yale Center for British Art (1989), pp.Ã, 7-13.
- Sasha Grishin, David Blackburn and Visionary Landscape Traditions (London: Hart Gallery, 1994).
- Charlotte Mullins, David Blackburn: The Sublime Landscape (London: Hart Gallery, 2002).
- John Sheeran, 'David Blackburn', catalog of essays, Dulwich Picture Gallery (1986), pp.Ã, 7-13.
- Malcolm Yorke, David Blackburn: A Landscape Vision (London: Hart Gallery, 1999).
References
External links
- Official Website: http://www.davidblackburn.org
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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