I'm meeting with David Blackwood, for the first time, to discuss his new show of monoprints and paintings - all flowers, bursting with light and colour - an exhibition at the Emma Butler Gallery. I walk along Bond Street to the Fairmont Hotel. Moonlight makes the asphalt as shiny as patent leather. There are haloes of pinkish red around the streetlights. The sky is large and black. Shadows look cross-hatched. The world seems big. I've spent the afternoon reading William Gough's book, David Blackwood, Master Printmaker, and, walking now in the cold night air, everything looks like a Blackwood print.
In David Blackwood's Newfoundland, light breaks by glimmering over the tops of cliffs. It radiates from behind houses or bursts from church spires in the form of flame; it glows inside clouds and ice. It is a transformative force.
Front Cover of Cassie Brown's "Death on the Ice"
Blackwood's icebergs, sealing disasters, and isolated town of Wesleyville are gothic landscapes, sublime in scale, and the light in the has a mythic quality. More than just light - it has the metaphoric power to conquer darkness. Rather than suggesting the battle of good over evil, Blackwood's light provokes a gentler morality in which hope triumphs over despair.
I think of the Blackwood print on the cover of Cassie Brown's Death on the Ice, a high school textbook when I was in grade ten at Holy Heart. I remember sitting in a desk with Brown's book, the same book on every desk in the room, mesmerized by the cover illustration, understanding that the men on the ice were possibly dead, or would soon be dead. Understanding how slow a death those men were meeting, how they had to become acquainted with the idea gradually before accepting it. How Blackwood keeps the tragedy of the situation at bay, however briefly, with the plangent torch one man holds against the darkness.
The classroom windows were full of overcast skies, falling snow; some of the nuns were still wearing habits, but modern habits by then, to the knee, crisp, whispering polyester, navy blue, and the smell of chalk and waxy floor polish. Most of the students at Holy Heart grew up in the suburbs, danced to disco, had just watched the films Grease and Saturday Night Fever at the Avalon Mall, would soon be hearing about the disaster of the Ocean Ranger and the Mount Cashel scandal. In grade ten, Blackwood's print and Cassie Brown's story of the sealing disaster were a part of a past that seemed long, long ago. Much longer ago than it seems now.
That etching, along with Cassie Brown's story of unnecessary tragedy, changed me. I experienced it alongside Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird and Steinbeck's The Pearl and short stories by Richard Wright about systemic racial prejudice in America. Those were the staples of the Newfoundland curriculum when I was in grade ten.
Blackwood's prints felt familiar to me, the way dreams or nightmares are familiar, made up of things you already know, bits and pieces of the long day, and also some larger, magnificent, sometimes frightening story.
The men on the cover of Death on the Ice are frozen and huddled and alone in a landscape so vast and cold and full of death the print strikes a metaphysical note. Here is a timeless landscape, shape-shifting, without signposts, as timeless as the chunks of broken ice and glacier the men have gathered upon. But it is also a landscape from a very distinct time when all over the industrialized world men's lives were made expendable in the name of profit. The torch one man holds out against the night sky is like a voice, a human cry.
Often, with Blackwood's iconic Newfoundland prints, the viewer is at a great distance from the subject, both spatially and temporally - the sort of distance that might be described as omniscient. In the novel, omniscience allows for the effortless telescoping of time and space and suggests a godlike consciousness. There's a similar point-of view at work in Blackwood's prints.
Wesleyville: Cyril's Kite Over Blackwood's Hill, shows the community from above, as in an aerial photograph. There is a kite in the foreground; the bows on the tail tinted red, the only colour in the black and white image, drawing the viewer's eye over the full length of print. The power of the wind is palpable.
The kite itself glows with light as does the snow blanketing the community below. Some of the houses have lights in their windows. Children are tobogganing on a hill, but they appear antlike in size. Three figures have paused to chat at a corner in the road; they are joined by a dog. The sun is setting and darkness is coming on, though the snow still holds the glow of the day.
"Wesleyville: Cyril's Kite Over Blackwood's Hill": 1996, Etching, 37.5cm x 90cm
The remarkable thing about this print for me is that the viewer sees the community from the point-of-view of the kite itself, looming large in the sky over the figures below. The print evokes an overseeing power that can take in the entire community at once: people going home to their suppers, settling down for the night.
Similarly, in the print, Wesleyville: Seabird Hunters Returning Home, there is a giant, fully submerged whale in the foreground of the composition. The whale's tail is about to break the surface but has been caught just before doing so. The power of the tail drawing itself through the black water makes the entire surface of the print dynamic. The whale looks directly at the viewer with one eye. The whale's gaze situates the narrative point-of-view - the physical location of the story-teller - further out in a sea so cold and dark it has the mythic presence of an abyss.
The consciousness here is all-knowing, more godlike or magical than human. It knows about the creatures above and beneath the surface of the ocean. An inclusive and eerie narrative consciousness, akin to nature itself.
The omniscience in these prints is not only spatially expansive; it seems to trawl the past. William Gough's wonderful essay in David Blackwood, Master Printer reminds me of James Agee's depiction of dust bowl farmers during the depression in his book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Here is Gough's description of the paper used for kite making in the Wesleyville of David Blackwood's childhood:
…brown paper torn keen and true from the grocer's roll to be wrapped around all manner of things. At home, showing stains of salt beef or wax rubbings of cheddar cheese, impregnated with the scents of pickle juice or spices, the brown paper was carefully taken off the parcels and then folded into a diamond shape.
And here is Agee's description of gift wrap found in a bureau drawer of a poor farming family in the dust bowl:
One [piece] is plain brown wrapping paper but has glued to it several seals of santaclaus and scotch terriers and bells in holly garlands. These papers are now torn in a number of places, rather somber and faded, and are intricately seamed and ridged over all their surfaces with years of wrapping and unfolding. They smell stale and old.
Nothing is taken for granted, not even a piece of paper. Both pieces of writing accompany visual works (in Agee's case, the photographs of Walker Evans) that set out to capture lives full of punishing work, battles against hostile environments and the tragedy that sometimes ensues. But also there is attention given to small, whimsical pleasures: the wrapping of a gift, flying a homemade kite. The effort is not just to preserve these lives with ethnographic accuracy, but to value them, just as the pieces of paper were preserved and valued. There's an urgency in the getting down of each precious detail, every smell and etched line, because it already belongs to the past.
"Passing Shadow": 1990, Etching, 80cm x 50cm
Blackwood's etchings are only a portion of the giant body of work for which he has gained a stellar international reputation. His paintings and monoprints tend to be more taken up with formal concerns. Like Gough's description of the old wrapping paper used for making kites - evocative texture, stains, folds - Blackwood's paintings and monoprints luxuriate in their own materiality.
Blackwood's International Code Series has as much in common with the American abstract expressionist paintings of Jasper Johns as it does with his narrative etchings of Wesleyville.
The International Code was originally designed by the British Navy, David tells me in the bar of the Fairmont. There is a flag for each letter of the alphabet and each numeral from one to ten. In 1805, for example, during the Battle of Trafalgar, each ship would have a flag officer sending a message such as, "England expects every man to do his duty." The flags were visible even in the smoke of battle.
After confederation, in 1949, Newfoundland seamen were suddenly required by law to obtain a ticket in order to be the Captain of a vessel.
Many of these men were Master Mariners, David says, but some were unable to read or write. They were forced to pass a written examination that included knowledge of the International Code.
David remembers his father making cards that represented each flag, colouring the cards with crayons, and laying them out on the table in order to memorize them.
"I remember my father saying, 'If you're smart you'll learn the International Code'," he says.
Jasper Johns was credited with bringing the figurative back into abstract expressionism by doing paintings of two-dimensional objects: signs and symbols.
Peter Schjedahl, in the New Yorker, describes Johns' flag painting this way:
By taking an object from the realm of common fact - as he did throughout the fifties and sixties, with paintings of targets, numbers, maps, and more flags - and then returning it to the realm transfigured, he rescued art from the endgames of modern art, including lately played-out Abstract Expressionism.
Blackwood's International Code Series employs a similar sort of visual logic. The flags are flat and don't require the optical illusions of perspective in order to appear realistic. Because Blackwood is painting the symbols of a code, there is an inherent reference to narrative at work. There is a secret, or the hint of a secret, present in the very suggestion of a code, the seeds of a plot. The story is the story of empire, as it turns out, of British colonialism and the constraints cast upon able seamen upon joining confederation.
Blackwood's Ephraim Kelloway's Door series also takes as its subject a two-dimensional object.
Ephraim Kelloway owned a property near the Blackwoods in the 1950s. Most homes in
Wesleyville at the time were painted bright white but the Kelloway property had never been painted. Kelloway became somewhat famous in the community of Welseyville for painting the door of his barn in several different colours for no apparent reason.
David tells me, "The door was on an outbuilding of Ephraim's property. Both the house and the shed were never painted and the wood had weathered. One day Ephraim painted the door to the shed. A couple of weeks later he painted it again. Once he used stovepipe paint and the door was silver. Another time it was fluorescent pink. Gradually he began to add bits and pieces to the surface, a horseshoe and lettered tin. The surface paint peeled and the texture became a part of the overall effect.
"It was an example of authentic folk art," David says. "Ephraim Kelloway was a painter."
In the art catalogue that accompanied the show of Kelloway's Door paintings, Blackwood notes of his Red Door painting of 1985: "This painting gave me the idea to use the door motif as a vehicle for a personal voyage of exploration and discovery in the medium of painting. It would serve as a point of departure, and allow the painting itself to become the objective."
The painting itself is what seems at the fore of the 2005 show at the Emma Butler Gallery, Flowers for Siromani. This collection of paintings and monoprints, Blackwood's fifth exhibition exclusively of flowers, is full of the joy of experimenting with the formal qualities of paint.
"From Kendra: Flowers for Siromani" Monotype, 24" x 36"
The exhibition is also a celebration of Blackwood's son, David Judah Blackwood, who passed away in 2005, at the age of thirty-three, after a ten year battle with cancer.
"Siromani" means yoga master and David Judah Blackwood had earned the title. He was also a painter, as well as a photographer and dub master, well-known as a top spinner and selector in Toronto. He was a world traveller, a Buddhist and scholar of reggae music and culture.
The watercolour, Self-Portrait as a Rude Boy, shows one of David Judah Blackwood's selfportraits. David's son had worked in Jamaica teaching children and the Jamaican term 'rude boy' is slang for 'street kid.' The self-portrait, as it appears in David Blackwood's watercolour, is a subtle wash, a quiet but firm presence.
In many of these works the flowers fill the frame, or almost do. From Kendra: Flowers for Siromani is a vivid splash of delicate yellow blossoms. The oncidium, or dancing ladies, a type of orchid, spreads its flowers almost uniformly over the top half of the monoprint.
"Geraniums on the Terrace": Watercolour, 20" x 27"
Geraniums on the Terrace shows big red flowers, bright and blurred as fireworks. The gladioli in Toni Onley and Glads also flare with red and yellow.
There are influences of Japanese printmaking in the airy delicacy of the blossoms and the sure, spontaneous draftsmanship, the willing acceptance of accidental surprises, the use of pattern. The traces of brushstroke over the glass are visible in the monoprints and the movement of the artist's hand, the energetic swishing action of the brush. These flowers are important to David Blackwood because of the people who gave them as gifts or those who nurtured them.
The works are also reminiscent of Matisse in their use of harmonious colour and flattened planes. Clematis, azaleas, geraniums, white peonies - these monoprints and paintings are full of springtime renewal.
David says, "I could have been paralyzed with David's passing - but he would have said, 'Give me a break.'"
Blackwood's vast landscapes deliver a stunning emotional punch because of the physical grandeur they encompass, the stark or somber palette, and the heady recollection of the past; the intimate scale of these floral works and their vivid, bold colour, coupled with the very personal nature of the subject matter, make these works similarly powerful.
I was most struck by the dazzling light in these watercolours and monoprints, the sensuous ease that feels not just full of light, but enlightened.
"Monotypes offer an incredible freedom," David says. "You paint on a plate of glass. The paper is peeled off and you have a surprise. The whole thing is reversed. You have no idea what you're getting. Sometimes it's a tremendous disappointment. Or it's a miracle."
Stepping out onto the dark sidewalk after my meeting with David Blackwood, I could see, again, the incandescence of those flowers. The show felt like a remarkable act of generosity, and, obliquely, of hope.
"The monoprints appear to be full of light partly because of the transparency of the Japanese rice paper on which they are printed," David says. "There's a heavier rag behind them and the light goes through the rice paper and is reflected on the paper behind."
The images are lit from within, I realize. Light is not a metaphor, but the actual material force, present between the sheets of paper.
