QAG-2015-21

LURE of THE SUN: Charles Blackman in Queensland page 19. The Blackmans’ first child, Auguste, was born on 12 April 1957 in Brisbane. For the 1957 Women’s Weekly Portrait Prize, Blackman painted Barbara and Auguste , a work emphasising the sense of touch and the bond between mother and child. Barbara’s partial blindness taught Blackman to not rely solely on his visual engagement with the world, but to consciously experience it through all his senses, and he sought to capture this heightened sensory engagement in his works. At this time, Blackman painted the Glass House Mountains with fellow artist Clifton Pugh, but his mountains transformed into mural-sized ‘Alice’ pictures in his under-the-house studio at Indooroopilly. 14 Following exhibitions of the ‘Alice’ series in Melbourne and Brisbane, Blackman’s position as a major young Australian artist was consolidated. When Queensland poet and friend Judith Wright later wrote the foreword to the catalogue for Blackman’s retrospective at the David Jones Art Gallery in Sydney in 1968, she articulated just how central Barbara (and Alice) were to Blackman’s success: . . . her she is Alice; he painted her in this role ten years ago. She is lucky to be known so well by a great painter; but he is lucky, too, to have found her waiting for him at all the important cross-roads in his own world, and to have recognised her for the touch-stone that she is. 15 Blackman gave Barbara all the unsold ‘Alice’ paintings in honour of their first child. When their second child, Christabel, was born in Melbourne in 1959, the Blackmans decided to move to Brisbane permanently. Barbara continued to be his muse for a series of paintings of women with bouquets of flowers and sightless eyes — for instance, The bouquet 1961 — the works being inspired by Barbara’s increasing blindness and the flower farms of Tamborine; Tamborine Mountain was the home of the Blackmans’ close friends Judith Wright and philosopher Jack McKinney. A sell-out exhibition at Brisbane’s Johnstone Gallery in 1960 enabled them to purchase a house at Highview Terrace, St Lucia, with a garage identified as a prospective studio. 16 They had barely moved in when Blackman won the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship. 17 The couple then travelled to London, arriving on 2 February 1961, not returning to Australia until 1966. Blackman’s formative period in Queensland proved a time of familial security that nurtured his art. Brisbane, however, seemed too small for him on his return to Australia and his creative and personal partnership with Barbara began to disintegrate. 18 Painter mates and poet friends Brisbane beckoned us . . . painter mates in the city . . . and poet friends on their mountain. 19 Judith Wright and Jack McKinney had considerable influence on the ‘self-taught’ Blackman, their friendship formed through the close connection Barbara had developed with Judith in the early Barjai days. Barbara recalled their first meeting: . . . of all the Barjai guests, two magnetised me. Judith Wright, almost twice my young age, deaf with her awkward off-range voice . . . read her first book of unpublished poems, and JP McKinney, non-academic philosopher, gave a paper on ‘emotional honesty’. Both lifted me sky high and thereafter Jack-n-Judith became lifetime friends . . . I breathed their book-lined air and plunged into bottomless questioning at Quantum, the little bush house on the long red mountain road at Tamborine. 20 Blackman was also captivated: The influence of talking to Jack and Judith was a very strong one. Probably I spent as much time listening to them talking about poetry, as in doing anything else . . . Jack was at his peak then, a great talker — and he helped me a great deal; he informed a lot of my interests in writing. 21 Blackman’s work The family 1955 honours this relationship. The painting recalls a winter’s day picnic at Cedar Creek near Tamborine. Daughter Meredith McKinney observed: . . . for Charles my father was probably . . . well to say ‘father figure’ is a very simplistic thing, but the talks that he and my father had were things that sort of drew Charles into new and exciting directions. 22 Blackman also acknowledged these close ties in Jack McKinney reading 1955, painted after spending the winter looking after the couple’s house at Tamborine Mountain. Girl over Tamborine Mountain 1966 Oil on canvas / 213 x 153cm / Private collection, Brisbane / Photograph: Carl Warner