Charles Blackman

(born 1928)

Illusion of Children, c.1966

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Mrs Rua Osborne, Sydney
thence by descent
Private collection, Western Australia

EXHIBITED
Charles Blackman: New Paintings, South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne, 29 March - 22 April 1966, cat. 19

LITERATURE
Bernard Smith, 'Show by Charles Blackman rich and varied', The Age, Melbourne, 23 March 1966
Alan McCulloch, 'Haunted Images', The Herald, Melbourne, 23 March 1966, p.29 (illus.)
Nadine Amadio, Charles Blackman: The Lost Domains, A.H. Reed, Sydney, 1980, fig. 5.7 (illus.)


Charles Blackman revisited the theme of children at the time when they were a fact in his London life. They also came out of the reality of the London climate, including the domestic reality of winter coats and warm red stockings and gloves for the children; his daughter Christabel provided the source for the girls.

But Blackman was also in touch with modern literature which he regarded as an entry into rather than an escape from real life. Reading, and in particular reading aloud to his wife Barbara, was the source of his most vivid and shared experience. During the big freeze of 1964 he had made a sequence of John Shaw Neilson collage drawings for Australian Letters: Poets and Painters series. They contained quotations from 'Schoolgirls Hastening' and 'You and Yellow Air' and Blackman had used a mixture of techniques to evoke the frailty and subtle rhythms of Neilson's words and imagery. In this context, the child fading on the right seems to touch the 'unknowable Divine'.

Indeed, this lyrical painting is in the manner of a dream. The figures are coloured and shaped against the 'golden day'. The motif of the blue glove that hovers within the clutch of girls on the left calls to the barely described arm in the centre, while that same 'dumb' arm reaches around the lighter coat of the red head in the threesome on the right. Turning away from the viewer, this smaller group of girls is the more fragile. The darker girl in a green gown steadies her two companions who appear almost to flutter and vanish into the 'white of Heaven' beyond.

Illusion of Children was painted towards the end of Blackman's five-year residence in London, a time when leading critics reached for superlatives in praise of his pictures. Elwyn Lynn declared that Blackman's paintings 'celebrate the radiant serenity of domestic bliss and are blessed by, it seems, all the household gods clad in lustrous or tenderly shadowed raiment'; while in the words of Bernard Smith: 'Blackman's people have learned how to live on the other side of nothing. The soul reaches out nervously from its dark bed of loneliness in exhausting but never-ending encounters.'

Felicity St John Moore