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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.
Earlier works include a series of Italian landscapes rendered in gouache and watercolour 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.
“Blackadder graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1954 and this show presents a selection of quietly observed landscapes and interiors painted between 1955 and 1975. These works reveal a less well-known side of the artist – quite different from the flowers and cats for which she is so celebrated.”
Blackadder was the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy of Arts.
Burlingham said the gallery was particularly thrilled with the early landscapes. “These are softly rendered in earthy tones, with simplified forms which become almost abstract places. They show Blackadder going beyond mere observation in her response to the landscape.”
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Quiet Observations, Landscapes and Interiors 1955 to 1975, runs from 4 June to 4 July at the Jenna Burlingham Gallery in Kingsclere. Admission is free; the paintings are for sale.
