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LURE of THE SUN : Charles Blackman in Queensland LURE of THE SUN: Charles Blackman in Queensland page 21. page 20. Jon Molvig, regarded as one of Australia’s finest expressionist artists, came to Brisbane in 1953–54 to stay with his former East Sydney Technical College classmate John Rigby. He returned to Brisbane a year later and made the city his permanent home. Molvig explained his attraction to Brisbane in the mid 1950s: ‘I think Brisbane offered me more scope because it was virtually untouched, but it was much more provincial than it is now’. 23 Blackman felt a similar attraction to Brisbane with its isolation from the cultural centres of the south, and it was perhaps inevitable that he and Molvig would meet and develop a mutual respect and lasting friendship. In late 1959, Molvig persuaded Blackman to establish an art school near Burleigh Heads. Blackman agreed to travel to the school on weekends while spending weekdays at his studio in Brisbane. He once recalled being driven at a furious pace to and from the Gold Coast, perched precariously beside Molvig in a diminutive Goggomobil. 24 Sadly, the art school was a short-lived prospect, as Betty Churcher related in Molvig: The Lost Antipodean 1984: ‘the venture ended dramatically after a grass fire (started accidently during an outdoor painting class) had threatened to destroy the house and the surrounding cane farms’. 25 Acknowledging Molvig’s influence, Blackman reflected: I got a lot from him, although he and I are just about dead opposites. I was concerned with understanding and sympathy with human beings, whereas Molvig was more concerned with the human conflict. 26 Accordingly, St John Moore has stated: ‘working closely with Jon Molvig made his [Blackman’s] brushwork more expressive and gestural’. 27 Molvig’s 1957 portrait of Blackman alludes not only to their friendship, but also, significantly, to Blackman’s ‘Alice’ works from the same year. Blackman is depicted surrounded by flowers and accompanied by a white rabbit in ‘a parody of the imagery in some of the Alice paintings’. 28 In The Third Metropolis: Imagining Brisbane through Art and Literature 1940–1970 , William Hatherell noted: . . . perhaps the most important cultural institutions to develop in Brisbane during the postwar period were concerned with cultural distribution rather than production . . . These were the publishing houses Jacaranda Press and the University of Queensland Press (UQP), and the commercial art galleries, particularly the Johnstone Gallery. These institutions were particularly important for progressive individual artists in the context of a Brisbane cultural life that was predominately conservative in governmental cultural institutions such as the Queensland Art Gallery and in its volunteer ‘cultural civil society’. 29 Blackman’s UQP collaborations originated with his friendship with Frank Thompson, the energetic manager of the press during its most innovative years of publishing. UQP produced a number of significant books in the 1960s, including Ian Fairweather’s 1965 translation and illustrated edition of The Drunken Buddha and the ‘Artists in Queensland’ series in 1967, an interview- based series of monographs on Blackman, Judith Wright, Milton Moon and Andrew Sibley. Blackman and Thompson first met after the artist’s return from his European scholarship, and they would often catch up at the Royal Exchange Hotel in Toowong. Even when Blackman moved to Sydney, Thompson’s interstate travel meant they frequently kept in touch. A number of book collaborations resulted, including the publication of Barbara Blackman’s Certain Chairs in 1968, to which Blackman contributed a series of drawings illustrating Barbara’s account of their shared lives in various homes in which familiar pieces of furniture ensured some kind of familial continuity. In 1971, UQP published Apparition , a book of poems by A Alvarez, with paintings by Charles Blackman. The English poet and critic Alfred Alvarez had originally met Blackman in London in 1961, and the publication was the outcome of their close friendship. The seven vivid gouaches, reproduced at their original size in the publication, were painted in response to Alvarez’s poems. Blackman also developed close ties with Laurie Thomas, Director of the Queensland Art Gallery, 1961–67, and arts editor and feature writer for the Australian newspaper, 1968–73. In 1976, UQP published The Most Noble Art of Them All: The Selected Writings of Laurie Thomas , with introductions by Blackman and John Olsen, to acknowledge Thomas’s critical contributions to Australian art. In his introduction, Blackman stated: ‘in gratitude to him [Thomas] I am helping to hang this exhibition of his thoughts’. 30 The well-known Queensland modernist architect James Birrell first met Blackman in Melbourne in the early 1950s at a meeting of the Contemporary Arts Society, and he tells stories of sketching classes and Sunday lunches at Blackman’s home in Chrystobel Crescent, Hawthorn, in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. It was here that Blackman gave Birrell paintings to take with him to Darwin, ‘so that I would have something to keep me sane’. 31 In A Life in Architecture: Beyond the Ugliness (2013), Birrell recalls taking walks with Blackman to sculptor Clement Meadmore’s place for a ‘drink and conversation’. 32 Meadmore lived upstairs in a Victorian terrace house that overlooked industrial buildings and railway yards where ‘schoolgirls walked past, sometimes skipped, in their hats and uniforms’. Birrell also recalled: ‘we studied art books with de Chirico prints in them’. 33 Untitled 1967 [Illustration from Barbara Blackman’s book The Little Lives of Certain Chairs, A Table or Two and other Inanimates of our Acquaintance (1968)] / Felt-tipped pen and ink / 28.5 x 19cm / Gift of Barbara Blackman to commemorate the University’s Centenary through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2010 / Collection: The University of Queensland / Photograph: Carl Warner