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Enamel and tempera on board Signed upper left
Painted in the 1950s Provenance Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne Exhibited Charles Blackman, The Schoolgirl Years 1951-1953, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, June 1988, cat. 16 Reference Shapcott, T., The Art of Charles Blackman, Andre Deutsch, London, 1989, illus. pl. 33 Blackman's now famous schoolgirl subjects derived partly from his observation of children in playgrounds on his way to casual gardening jobs in Ivanhoe and Toorak in the early 1950s. The exhibition of his first 'Schoolgirl' series, though controversial, was a critical and commercial success. They remain amongst his most important and celebrated images. The ambiguous conjunction of innocent young girls with an atmosphere of slight unease owes something to Blackman's memory of the unsolved murder of one of his wife Barbara's university friends. In his imagination, this episode was linked with John Shaw Neilson's evocative poems about schoolgirls: Get thou behind me Shadow-Death! Oh ye eternities delay! Morning is with me and the breath Of schoolgirls hastening down the way. Here the raw emotion of Blackman's subject is potently conveyed through both composition and colour. The child is completely alone, yet startlingly close to the viewer in front of an empty plane. Bright primary colours are set against emerald green: the red and green, as complimentary colours, charge one another with almost electric power. The often rapidly passing sadnesses of childhood, the dramatically felt anguishes of adolescence, the sense of isolation that children sometimes feel no matter how loving their family situation: all are evoked in the person of this fragile figure. Blackman's own childhood was not especially happy or secure and on one occasion he explained that the Schoolgirl paintings had a lot to do with fear; a lot to do with his isolation as a person and what he called his 'quite paranoid fear of loneliness'. Through all his art there runs a deep empathy with the lives of children and of women. Perhaps never more so than here.