Beschreibung:

GREY VAN Basil Blackshaw HRHA RUA (1932-2016)
Signature: signed lower right Medium: oil on board Dimensions: 11 x 15¼in. (27.94 x 38.74cm) Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner Exhibited: Literature: With a letter of provenance from Paul Yates publishing collaborator of Basil Blackshaw Though the description 'an anecdotal painter of country life' could be applied to a goodly proportion of 19th ... and 20th century Irish painters, it emphatically does not pertain to Basil Blackshaw (1932-2016) even though Basil, never a man for city life, ensconced himself in deepest countryside for most of his life, and even though his depicted world was populated by dogs, horses, cocks, 'doggie men', and farmers, as well as the Northern Irish landscape. As John Hewitt acutely observed, right at the start of the artist's career, this was a man who, although a representative painter, only used as much description as he deemed necessary, being more concerned with developing 'a relationship of shapes, colours, and lines which should be complete and satisfying in itself'(1). This dialogue between representation and abstraction continued for the rest of his life. Often, and rightly, regarded as one of the major Irish painters (2), Blackshaw can easily be seen as being in that lineage which stretches from Paul Henry William Conor Keating and O'Neill through to himself, but this is a limited and limiting view of the man. Although he may seem the most 'Irish' of painters his subject matter has always been subject to a crucible of influences: the English school from Stubbs through to Alan Reynolds; the School of Paris, and in particular De Stael, Buffett and Giacometti; the early twentieth century expressionists from Die Brücke to Kokoschka; the European and especially the German Neo Expressionists such as Baselitz; and finally American colour-field painting in the shape of Maurice Louis, Frankenthaler and company. Basil's gift for assimilation, his ability to 'remain his own man' in the slipstream of such influences, marks him out as a In the current auction, he is represented by two groups of work. One group, from the eighties, depicts horses (almost his trademark), the other, from the late nineties onwards, relate to the artist's collaborations with the poet Paul Yates The first of these, the four Dunadry mixed-media paintings [lot 72], refer to a Poem-and-Prints limited edition for U.N.I.C.E.F. (See separate note). The others are in the spirit of the works produced for the second collaboration between the poet and the painter, the book Mourne, published by the Tom Caldwell Gallery in 2005. None of these works can be classed as illustration. In some cases, Basil responded to a specific poem, in others the poet responded to Basil's images, but as the painter Jack Pakenham trenchantly noted, they were all 'independent images sparked off in his imagination by the poems' (3). The present work, Grey Van, for instance is a marvellous work. This is a painting to make you smile. It's the essence of a van, seen with the seemingly artless vision of a child but layered with neo-Expressionist elements from the Germans, from American colour-field painting, and even perhaps from the world of Paddy Graham. No child however could have managed the impeccably organised colour harmonies: those utterly non-representational swathes of orangey-yellow beneath the van; those wheels utterly out of alignment; and those transitions in the sky that magically shift from whitey-pinks on the left, to the deep pinky 'sunset' reds on the right. (1) Written for the first issue of the magazine Threshold, Belfast 1957. (2) For example, in Brian Fallon's article 'Evergreen Basil', in Basil Blackshaw Fenton Gallery, Cork 2005. (3) From Jack Pakenham's Introduction to the book Mourne, Belfast 2005. (4) From an unpublished part of an interview with Blackshaw by Brian McAvera, 2002. more