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David Blackwood - Recent Watercolours (Interiors and Landscapes)

2260 Oak Bay Avenue

SEPTEMBER 9 - OCTOBER 6, 2007

Preview Saturday, September 8, 2007 10:00 am - 5:30 pm

(work subject to prior sale)

Opening Reception Sunday September 9, 2007 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm

David Blackwood in attendance; Elizabeth Ely, harpist

Exhibition continues until October 6, 2007

In the 1970s David Blackwood completed a sequence of watercolour and gouache maritime landscapes. The series ran its course with gouache becoming the emphasis. Blackwood produced almost 200 still life monotypes between 1986 and 2005. During that cycle he began to consider watercolour as a means to explore the still life motif. Other projects, however, intervened, and not until 2005, inspired by the exhibition of David Milne watercolours curated by Dr. Katharine Lochnan of the Art Gallery of Ontario - the exhibition opened that year at The Hermitage in Saint Petersburg - did Blackwood commence his watercolour still life series.

At the Ontario College of Art, which Blackwood attended from 1959 to 1963, he was inaugurated into watercolour technique by two great teachers: in the first year and slightly into the second year, Jock MacDonald, and from the first through to the fourth, Carl Schaefer. MacDonald's approach was: let the medium work for you; be experimental, for example splash a colour onto a wet piece of paper and see what happens. Schaefer emphasized precise drawing, calligraphy and the whiteness of the paper. (MacDonald admired the eminent American watercolourist John Marin, Schaefer the esteemed American watercolourist Charles Birchfield.)

For both the tight, literal, and the loose, lyrical, Blackwood showed an early propensity and has, through the years, paired both approaches with dramatic effect. He first does a fairly light graphite sketch and then draws with paint into wet paper to achieve a soft, diffused line. A sense of growth and transitory movement is achieved and the transparency of the watercolour paint evokes the ephemeral. The vitality of his flowers and inanimate objects is quite in contrast to the materiality of 17th Century Dutch still lifes with their richness of detail, colour, texture and fulsome form, characterizing, as they do, mature verdant growth. A phenomenally neat organization of the spaces is also apparent in those Dutch paintings.

Blackwood's compositions are exquisitely set out but their focus is not a twilight in which autonomy and life energy have been virtually spent. Even the mature forms in Blackwood's work are connected to light.

– Peter Redpath July 2007