The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Art world mourns Elizabeth Blackadder, aged 89
Celebrated Scottish artist Dame Elizabeth Blackadder has died aged 89. In 1994, the year that Damien Hirst made his first vitrined sheep, Away from the Flock, pickled in formaldehyde, Dame Elizabeth finished a work called Still Life With Cats.
The cats were painted in oil on canvas, joining many others in Blackadder’s oeuvre, alongside arum lilies, Japanese fans and tins of sweets.
Mere difference of age does not explain the gap between Blackadder’s art and Hirst’s. Painters of her own generation – Bridget Riley was born in the same year, 1931 – worked in a style that was insistently modern. This was not Blackadder’s way.
When she and her husband, the artist John Houston, visited New York in 1969 on the way to paint the Wyoming landscape, they made trips to the Museum of Modern Art to see Picasso and Matisse, not Pollock and Warhol.
Modern art institutions returned the compliment: there are only half a dozen or so Blackadders in the Tate, all but one of them lithographs, few ever on show and none more recent than 1963.
The British Council Collection holds only two Blackadders, the Arts Council’s none at all. And yet, there is more to the story than meets the eye.
Blackadder’s eye is not so much meticulous as engineered: this is botanical painting rather than flower painting.
In an untypically expansive moment, Blackadder hazarded that “the space between flowers (in her work) is as important as the flowers themselves”, adding that her pictures invented themselves as they went along.
Daughter of Thomas and Violet Blackadder, she came from a family of Falkirk engineers. Her father’s factory in the town, Blackadder Brothers’ Garrison Foundry and Engine Works, had been built by Thomas’ own grandfather in 1851.
In later life, she refused to talk about her art. She did, however, admit to having had an early teacher. “My father was an engineer, but he drew a lot, mostly boats,” she recalled in a BBC interview to mark her 80th birthday.
“From a young age, he helped me to draw.” Blackadder’s father died when she was 10. After leaving Falkirk High School, she joined the new joint fine-and-applied arts course at Edinburgh University in September 1949, where the Byzantinist David Talbot Rice was her tutor.
Blackadder found herself exposed to the Byzantine obsession with pattern, a taste at once formal and decorative.
Another discovery was the Italian primitives, particularly Piero della Francesca.
In her final year, spent at the Edinburgh College of Art, she met Houston, a fellow student. When Blackadder won a travel scholarship with her firstclass degree, the pair set off for Italy. They were married in Edinburgh the following year, 1956, a partnership that was to last until Houston’s death in 2008.
Like the cats in her pictures, she remained elusive, representing herself with objects she owned, rather than showing herself full-face.