Basil Blackshaw, a countryman at heart, a painter of horses and dogs, is sometimes regarded as an anecdotal painter of country life but his recent work breaks new ground, writes Aidan Dunne
Basil Blackshaw turned 70 last year and, given he is one of the foremost artists in Northern Ireland, it is appropriate the Ulster Museum should mark his birthday with an exhibition of his work. A retrospective might have seemed an obvious choice, but as he was the subject of a retrospective at Belfast's Ormeau Baths Gallery as recently as 1995, the museum opted instead for a survey show spanning a few years of his output. Hence Basil Blackshaw: Paintings 2000-2002 at the Ulster Museum.
The decision was a good one, not least because the exhibition, which is outstanding, includes a major new series of paintings, previously unseen in public, a series that marks a surprising and significant development in Blackshaw's work.
Admittedly it is possible habitual fans of work will find this series, Windows, a bit disconcerting, as it offers little by way of anecdotal content to hang a picture on. And Blackshaw, a countryman at heart, a painter of horses and dogs, is sometimes regarded as an anecdotal painter of country life, despite evidence to the contrary.
With Windows he pushes further than before the implicit dialogue in his painting between what might be described, if in a rather loose way, as representation and abstraction. The close-to-monochromatic Windows are compositionally spare and schematic, consisting essentially of grey-on-grey oblongs.
There is just about enough detail in each case to anchor the image in a real, depicted space but, interestingly, captions scrawled across the surface identify this space as a painter's studio, underlining the fact that these are, to some extent, paintings about painting.
This makes them sound rather dry and arid, which is not the case. As ever with Blackshaw's work, they provide us with rich ocular experiences. It is as if in them he is looking critically at what painting is and what it can do, how it relates to the world of facts and our experience of the world. There are surely references to Mark Rothko's spiritually charged paintings, those archetypal abstracts consisting solely of soft blocks of amorphous colour and, on occasion, greys. In Blackshaw's Windows, painting is a screen that comes between ourselves and the world. We can't see what is beyond the window blinds that seem to block whatever views might lie beyond, but there is more than enough to occupy our eyes and our minds in what we actually see and in what is intimated of a world beyond the paint surface.
There is a certain quality of foreboding and unease in the starkness of the images, a foreboding that is, though, largely offset by Blackshaw's evident delight in the buoyant luminosity of the light that shows through and floods in around the blinds.
In a footnote to his essay on the exhibition, the Ulster Museum's S.B. Kennedy records that, in conversation, the artist remarked that the underlying subject matter of one of the Window paintings "was what he termed 'the meaning of existence'", and that "the void beyond the windows stood as a metaphor for the 'apprehension' created by the emptiness of the scene".
Pictorial tension is generated by what we cannot actually see in the picture. This is the opposite of how we usually think of painting, but it is not unusual of painting. While "the meaning of existence" may sound a tad ambitious as a description of paintings with blank windows as their ostensible subject, they live up to it.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that Blackshaw is famously bluff and unpretentious about his own work, and is never less than candid about his concerns. One of the most interesting aspects of these paintings is the light they cast, so to speak, on the remainder of his output.
In a book published to coincide with the 1995 retrospective, his long-term model, Jude Stephens, has a remarkable piece, Basil Who?, that provides not only a vivid picture of his life and working methods but also a profound insight into the work itself. She notes how, having painstakingly built up a representational image from life, Blackshaw would, "within hours or even minutes of my departure . . . return to the studio and obliterate the image". A finished painting results from the cancellation of an image.
But the painting would not be possible without the prior, underlying existence of that image. And somehow, knowledge of that prior state comes through, giving Blackshaw's work a physical conviction conveyed, as he puts it, not through mimicry but by means of equivalence.
There are several fine paintings of the figure in the Ulster Museum show. In one, Standing Figure, Blackshaw takes a characteristic approach in that he positions the nude centrally, as though to create an iconic, definitive account, something he also does in relation to animals in, for example, the terrific The Walk of the Horse, also in the current show. The figure seems crammed into the format of the painting, truncated above and below. Yet although everything is directed towards emphasising the materiality of the figure in a sculptural, Giacometti-like way, it is at the same time clearly cancelled in the manner described. This procedure is elaborated in several other paintings in which the main subject is, in a sense, not a figure but the absence of a figure.
There are several studies of individual garments and two, Coat and Coloured Rain, of someone wearing a garment, a coat, which in each case becomes the main subject in an odd and striking way. Blackshaw again takes a central, frontal view of a truncated figure, with arms outstretched, so that the big, bulky coat effectively becomes an oblong within the oblong of the picture - or, like the Windows, a picture within a picture.
While his paintings of the window intimates that there is a view, a world beyond, similarly, his flattened images of coats intimate there is a figure, a human presence beneath the fabric of the coat, just as there is a figure somewhere behind the paint and canvas of the painting.
Intriguingly, this correspondence is further underlined by the way he uses rain - coloured rain - in one image, as an equivalent for paint and the painting process. The almost playful quality of all this does not for a moment detract from the pictures' exceptional qualities, and help make the show such a lively, engaging and rewarding experience.
Basil Blackshaw: Paintings 2000-2002 is at the Ulster Museum until May 5th. Telephone: 028-90383000; see the museum website at www.ulstermuseum.org.uk