Beschreibung:

NUDE SEATED Basil Blackshaw HRHA RUA (1932-2016)
Signature: signed lower left Medium: oil on board Dimensions: 18¾ x 13¼in. (47.63 x 33.66cm) 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 painter of at least European stature. The remarkable Nude Seated [lot 73] depicts a hierarchic nude, squared off in a Francis Bacon like cage or grid, emerging from a swirling miasma of paint as if about to materialise in Star Trek's teleporter. The figure itself, with its schematics of head, hands and feet, is substantially created out of short, sharp straight lines - a black line for eyebrows and eyes for instance. It's a construction, but a construction in tension with the swirling miasma around it. We are not looking at a portrait: we are looking at an icon. (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. Brian McAvera, October 201 more