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Judith
Wright (b. 1915) was a poet, literary critic, editor,
and fiction writer, as well as an active and influential conservationist
and Aboriginal rights advocate. Her poems accordingly reflect
‘the love of the land we have invaded and the guilt of
the invasion’.
Wright
met and married the journalist, playwright and bushman Jack
McKinney in the 1940s, and the couple became good friends with
Charles and Barbara Blackman. This work recalls a day when the
two families, both to assume great cultural significance to
Australia, happily picnicked at Cedar Creek near Tamborine in
the winter of 1955.
Barbara
Blackman recently purchased this painting of her ‘good
dear beloved long friend’ especially for the National Portrait
Gallery, which she has long championed.
Charles
Blackman (b.1928) initially worked as a press artist
for the Sydney Sun (1945), before moving to Melbourne where
he married, worked as a cook and practised his art when he could.
His situation changed when he received the patronage of John
Reed — leading to several exhibitions. John Shaw Neilson
and other writers influenced his thinking and saw the advent
of the schoolgirl and her flowers, a recurrent theme in his
art. In 1960 he won the Helena Rubinstein Scholarship and this
resulted in his work being shown in London at the Whitechapel
and Tate Gallery exhibitions (1961-62). A 1965 visit to France
and Flanders was followed by a series of tapestries being woven
in Portugal. These were shown in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
His first wife and model Barbara, was a significant influence
on his early development.
A
major retrospective of his work toured most state galleries
in 1993, and this reinforced his great contribution to Australian
art, especially through his works of the 1950s-70s.
Charles
Blackman said of Judith Wright, (as recounted by Barbara Blackman),
"She doesn’t have a face, she has poems written all
over her visage".
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