RIP Dame Elizabeth Blackadder

Elizabeth Blackadder

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder has died. She was one of those very underrated artists that simply do things very well. Blackadder's work celebrated her love of flowers, cats and everyday things, as well as investigating the way forms could pattern their way across a surface. She was a very sensitive user of watercolour, allowing it to be what it needed to be, whilst at the same time being able to pick out the salient details and particular aspects of plant life, that would ensure that whatever she was recreating still retained a life of its own.

Elizabeth Blackadder

As an artist she would not talk about why she did the things she did other than to say she liked stuff, but if you follow her work you can see that she has a sharp visual intelligence that enables her to make compositional images appear as if they are simply 'there' or 'right'. Composition was her forte, and she loved the work of Piero Della Francesca, somehow translating his mathematical grasp of composition into a much more informal methodology, one that totally suited her everyday subject matter.

I shall miss her, even in the days when I was making purely conceptual pieces, I remember seeing her work and gazing at it in relief, it didn't need anything to be taken on board to be understood beyond, 'I looked at this and it was wonderful'.

See also:

Drawing plants

Beuys and Cotman

A drawing of beaked hawks beard

Why draw animals