Artist Charles Blackman departs at 90 having ‘painted our dreams’

Charles Blackman had a long and prolific career but he remains best known for the pictures he painted in the 1950s.

Charles Blackman photographed at an aged-care home in Sydney for an article published in The Australian on August 8. Picture: John Feder.

Charles Blackman did his apprenticeship drawing outlines for ­Ginger Meggs cartoons but by the time he met poet Barbara Patterson he’d forgotten the redhead larrikin and his artistic sensibility was drawn to a feminine world that was strange and wonderful.

Blackman died in Sydney yesterday, a week after his 90th birthday. He had a long and prolific career but he remains best known for the pictures he painted in the 1950s of Alice in Wonderland in which wife Barbara was his model.

Barbara was blind and was pregnant with the couple’s first child, Auguste. The whimsical Alice pictures were a way of coming to grips with life’s new circumstances. Blackman had discovered a visual language with which to give expression to the world of feelings and intuition.

F armer, mount tamborine (1995)

“Charles painted our dreams,” Auguste Blackman said yesterday. “The dream of his life was the dream of all our lives.”

Blackman’s lyrical style fell out of favour during the mid-century vogue for abstraction. But art historian Felicity St John Moore said those who loved his paintings often didn’t let them go, such was their “ineffable, poetic quality”.

“People have held Blackman paintings, good paintings,” said Ms St John Moore, who curated a 1993 Blackman retrospective at the ­National Gallery of Victoria. “The quality varies but people don’t part with them easily.”

Blackman grew up in Sydney’s Harbord in a working-class home with no love of books or art. He left school at 13 to work as an illustrator at The Sun newspaper in Sydney where his job included drawing the outlines of Ginger Meggs comic strips. He moved to Brisbane in 1948 and fell in with a group of poets that included Barbara. She helped open the world of literature for him — not only Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which they listened to as a talking book, but also French symbolists and other richly imaginative works.

The couple moved to Melbourne where Blackman became part of the Heide circle and held his first exhibition in 1953. With Arthur Boyd, John Brack and Robert Dickerson, he was part of the Antipodeans group whose manifesto rejected abstraction in favour of figurative art.

In London in the 1960s on a Helena Rubenstein Travelling Scholarship, his work was shown in prominent exhibitions of Australian art at the Whitechapel Gallery and the Tate. Paintings of schoolgirls and young women continued to feature prominently but he was also an accomplished draughtsman and his work was collected in an album from the year he spent in Paris, Paris Dreaming.

The Friends (1953)

Charles and Barbara divorced in 1978 and Blackman remarried twice. Barbara Blackman, a writer and prominent donor to the arts, is in frail health in Canberra. As ­recently as two weeks ago, Blackman was still drawing with coloured felt-tip pens: pictures of cloaked figures that seemed to emerge from shadows described with heavy crosshatching. His family had been preparing some of his earlier works for an exhibition due to open in Sydney on September 22. The exhibition will now be a tribute to his life and career.

Blackman had been in poor health for years and had dementia. Family and friends gathered to spend an hour or two with him on August 12 for his 90th birthday. Auguste Blackman said his ­father had lived a full life. “He climbed the highest mountain, and came down the other side,” he said.