On
11th September 2012, Carol’s friend Anne drove us up to the F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio in
Banbridge Co. Down to see a retrospective of paintings and drawings by Basil
Blackshaw a painter’s painter who had been a hero of my old art teacher Kenneth
Donfield. There were few Irish artists I would travel
such a distance to see - but Basil Blackshaw was one of them. The border
between North and South was so subtle that we looked around unsure if we had
entered the North. But when we saw the Union Jack flying over housing estates -
a primal shudder ran down my spine. Still apart from the flags there was little
to distinguish between Republic of Ireland bungalows and Unionist bungalows. After
a life time of watching ‘The Troubles’ on television, I had avoided Northern
Ireland like the plague, so it was my first ever trip to the North and I was
pleasantly surprised by how normal it was. The centre was a beautiful one with
very friendly and helpful staff. Before going around the exhibition, Anne
bought us coffees and delicious scones with cream and strawberry jam.
I
did not think much of F.E. McWilliam’s work, though I did find his more
intimate and personal small sculptural maquettes more interesting than his
large scale bronzes. I found F.E. McWilliam’s version of surrealism kitsch and
inelegant and his expressionistic work inspired by the bombings of The Troubles
unredeemably brutalistic. Looking at McWilliam’s various 3d playthings, it struck me again that sculpture could descend into
abysmal kitsch faster than painting ever could. However, I admired F.E.
McWilliam’s more conventional portraits and busts from early in his career – and
it struck me again, that many regional artists had not profited from their
modernist adventures. McWilliam seemed to have given
up on such slow and deliberate study of form and turned to make a series of
pastiches of fashionable styles - yet originating nothing. Still, I wondered
what kind of artist he might have been if he had more integrity and courage to
avoid the allure of each passing fad.
The
retrospective of over sixty years of work by Basil Blackshaw proved to me that
he was painting better and better. His early work was very strong and always
wonderfully painterly with hints at an obsessive interest in Cézanne and Walter
Sickert. More conservative art lovers must have been most impressed by his
realist paintings and drawings of horse races but I found them somewhat
irrelevant in the age of photography and lacking the intimacy of his paintings
of his pets. Though, Blackshaw’s portraits of friends (mostly male) were
evocative, I personally found his ‘portraits’ of his dogs and horses truly
insightful and full of love and respect. Blackshaw never made a casual or
sloppy brushstroke though his freedom and searching might have made the
unsophisticated think otherwise. He was a master of creams, browns, greys,
blacks and muted colours - yet his efforts at strong pure colour did not
convince me.
It
was Blackshaw’s paintings since the age of sixty-eight that most impressed me.
They married a modern day freedom reminiscent of Cy Twombly and even Basquiat
(especially with their deployment of writing and painterly erasure) with a
lifetime of realist skills and criticality – to create some of the strongest
arguments in favour of contemporary painting. They were so much more than mere
ideas in paint - they were paint come to life to embody a spiritual
manifestation. His hard-won virtuosity went beyond uncritical illustration,
tedious realism and crass expression into a painterly grandeur only a few ever
achieved. In his late paintings he made everything look childishly easy - but
as a fellow painter I knew what kind of mental and physical labour had gone
into such final life affirming freedom. These late paintings were some of the
very best and most relevant I had seen in years. I felt inspired to paint in
the presence of such valiant and free expressions. Before we left we bought the
catalogue for the exhibition, however I was disappointed when I saw how poorly
lit, discoloured and unfocused the reproductions of the paintings were.
Strangely in
retrospect, I found my initial impression of Blackshaw’s work diminished. His
early work struck me as too academic and his later work overshadowed by the far
greater examples of Cy Twombly and Jean Michel Basquiat, still he was one of
the few real painters in Ireland.