She may be best known for accessible paintings of flowers and cats, but a new exhibition of Elizabeth Blackadder’s work focuses instead on chilly landscapes and pared-back still life compositions.
The show in Hampshire, far from Blackadder’s Scottish home, presents a less familiar side of the artist, with most of the pieces exhibited for the first time, reported The Guardian.
Earlier works include a series of Italian landscapes rendered in gouache and watercolor in the 1950s soon after Blackadder left art college. The still life oil paintings are from the 1960s and 1970s.
The art writer and editor Anna Brady said Blackadder, who died in 2021 aged 89, painted the Italian landscapes after winning a travelling scholarship.
Writing in the show’s catalogue, she said: “Based in Florence, Blackadder would take a bus out into the countryside to paint. While we may have romantic ideals of painting trips to Tuscany, the reality of being a young woman, painting outside and alone, through a bitter winter in postwar Italy would have been altogether harsher. We can almost feel the chill on her fingertips in the group of inky Tuscan landscapes.”
In the later still life paintings, personal objects, such as a coffee pot, appear time and again.
Brady said: “Blackadder seems to gain confidence in doing more with less, her compositions becoming increasingly refined and pared back to the essentials.”
The gallery director, Jenna Burlingham, said: “What makes this exhibition so exciting is that it shines a light on works from the first two decades of Elizabeth Blackadder’s career.”
