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Elizabeth Blackadder in 2011. 'The space between flowers is as important as the flowers themselves,' she said.
Elizabeth Blackadder in 2011. ‘The space between flowers is as important as the flowers themselves,’ she said. Photograph: PA
Elizabeth Blackadder in 2011. ‘The space between flowers is as important as the flowers themselves,’ she said. Photograph: PA

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder obituary

This article is more than 2 years old
Celebrated artist admired for her paintings of flowers and the first woman to be elected to both the Royal and Royal Scottish academies

In 1994, the year that Damien Hirst made his first vitrined sheep, Away from the Flock, pickled in formaldehyde, the artist Elizabeth Blackadder, who has died aged 89, finished a work called Still Life With Cats. The cats were painted in oil on canvas, joining many others in Blackadder’s oeuvre, alongside arum lilies, Japanese fans and tins of sweets.

Mere difference of age does not explain the gap between Blackadder’s art and Hirst’s. Painters of her own generation – Bridget Riley was born in the same year, 1931 – worked in a style that was insistently modern. This was not Blackadder’s way. When she and her husband, the artist John Houston, visited New York in 1969 on the way to paint the Wyoming landscape, they made trips to the Museum of Modern Art to see Picasso and Matisse, not Pollock and Warhol. Modern art institutions returned the compliment: there are only half a dozen or so Blackadders in the Tate, all but one of them lithographs, few ever on show and none more recent than 1963. The British Council Collection holds only two Blackadders, the Arts Council’s none at all. And yet, there is more to the story than meets the eye.

At first glance, a painting such as Iris Oncocylus (1996), in the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland, is not so much unapologetically outdated as defiantly so. Where Georgia O’Keeffe defeminised flower-painting by making oils of lilies that looked like vulvas, Blackadder’s watercolour irises might have been painted by an unusually adept aunt. A second look shows something more complex. Blackadder’s eye is not so much meticulous as engineered: this is botanical painting rather than flower painting. The disposition of her flowers on the paper is just that, a disposition rather than an arrangement.

Mixed Flowers and Jug, 2004. Illustration: Almond Design/Elizabeth Blackadder

In an untypically expansive moment, Blackadder hazarded that “the space between flowers [in her work] is as important as the flowers themselves”, adding that her pictures invented themselves as they went along. The two-dimensional sculpturalism of her irises owes more to Matisse than it does to, say, the flower painter Mary Butler. If Blackadder’s flowers are representational, the voids they create are abstract.

Daughter of Thomas and Violet Blackadder, she came from a family of Falkirk engineers. Her father’s factory in the town, Blackadder Brothers’ Garrison Foundry and Engine Works, had been built by Thomas’s own grandfather in 1851. Elizabeth was born in its shadow, in a sandstone villa at 6 Weir Street.

In later life, she refused to talk about her art. If forced to do so, she spoke in the kind of commonsensical terms that would have had conceptualists such as Hirst in tears – “I paint the centre of my flowers black,” Blackadder might say, adding, in a rare confessional burst, “Well, a kind of bluey-black.” She did, however, admit to having had an early teacher. “My father was an engineer, but he drew a lot, mostly boats,” she recalled in a BBC interview to mark her 80th birthday. “From a young age, he helped me to draw.” Blackadder’s father died when she was 10.

Another childhood influence was also familial. During wartime German bombing of Clydebank, Falkirk being on the bombers’ flight path, the young Elizabeth was dispatched by her mother to her grandmother’s house on Holy Loch. “I got sent out as a gardener for all [her] friends,” Blackadder would wryly recall. By her teens, she knew the Linnaean names of all the local wildflowers, and had pressed most in an album. This dual inheritance was to appear in her work as an artist.

Dark Pond, Alhambra, Granada, 1997, by Elizabeth Blackadder. Illustration: John McKenzie

After leaving Falkirk high school, she joined the new joint fine-and-applied arts course at Edinburgh University in September 1949, where the Byzantinist David Talbot Rice was her tutor. Blackadder found herself exposed to the Byzantine obsession with pattern, a taste at once formal and decorative. Another discovery was the Italian primitives, particularly Piero della Francesca. In her final year, spent at the Edinburgh College of Art, she met Houston, a fellow student. When Blackadder won a travel scholarship with her first-class degree, the pair set off for Italy. They were married in Edinburgh the following year, 1956, a partnership that was to last until Houston’s death in 2008.

Blackadder’s paintings of the period appear only mildly old-fashioned, although in a variety of ways. Tuscan Landscape (1958), in pen and ink, has the expressionist spikiness of a Graham Sutherland from the decade before. A self-portrait of the late 1950s resembles, and might have been painted by, Gwen John in her Edwardian youth. It was only with the irruption of jazzy, pop-ish colours into British figurative painting in the mid-60s that Blackadder found a real voice, even if it was characteristically quiet.

If she was too considered an artist for sudden shifts in her work, Flowers and Red Table (1969) comes close to being one. Although Blackadder’s trip with Houston to New York that year – typically, she went to stretch his canvases rather than to paint her own – was spent looking at modern, rather than contemporary, masters, Flowers and Red Table is at heart a colour field painting. Shorn of its representational elements – the titular jug of flowers, a piece of printed cloth – Blackadder’s picture might be Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue.

Its flattening of forms and relegation of them to the bottom edge of the canvas suggest a coming to terms with what was going on in New York, although they might equally derive from the Indian miniatures that Blackadder and Houston had begun to collect, or the Scottish colourists whose spirit hovered about the Edinburgh College of Art when they had been students there.

Whether these tensions in her work are grasped by the legion of fans who buy it reproduced on notelets and tea towels in museum gift shops seems unlikely. As with scenes of Venice (which Blackadder also painted), cats and flowers have a perennial following. What Blackadder made of this public is likewise unknowable. For all her refusal to analyse her work, it was grounded in art history and underpinned by a steely intelligence. On the other hand, having a middlebrow fan base brought its own rewards.

The first woman to be elected to both the Royal and Royal Scottish academies, she was made a dame in 2003 and appointed Her Majesty’s painter and limner in Scotland in 2001. It is hard to imagine this last honour being given to Riley. If she kept her political views as quiet as those on her own art, Blackadder nonetheless accepted a commission to design the Scottish first minister Alex Salmond’s official Christmas card in 2012.

Like the cats in her pictures, she remained elusive, representing herself with objects she owned – fans, kimonos, tortoiseshell combs – rather than showing herself full-face. Even the process of choosing these correlatives was kept private. Asked about it in 2011, Blackadder looked pained. Then she replied, in the tones of Miss Jean Brodie, “It’s just things in the house, really.”

Elizabeth Violet Blackadder, artist, born 24 September 1931; died 23 August 2021

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