Basil Blackshaw, An Edge of Society Man

The name Basil Blackshaw is a byword in the art world

in the island of Ireland for over six decades.

Yet he has remained an enigma, shunning all media attention,

choosing even to wear a mask

when attending an exhibition in Cork in 2005.

This is the story of the maker of some of Ireland's finest paintings,

of what has informed his work and shaped his direction of travel.

Basil is a complete artist.

There's nothing really he can't depict.

Whether it's a painting of a cock or a horse or a woman

or a bunch of flowers or a landscape,

you're looking at much more than the subject,

you are looking beyond the subject into the artist's own soul.

He appears to be a very straightforward,

down-to-earth, rural person, if you like.

But there's a lot going on underneath that.

Basil is a unique individual.

He is maverick, nonconformist...

..on the edge.

All these are big, big pluses for an artist.

When you look through Basil's catalogue, it's extraordinary,

just the variety of what he paints, day to day,

one day this, one day the other.

He is a one-off, he is one of those strange prophets

in the wilderness that British and Irish art does tend to throw up.

He is his own man, that's the thing about him.

He has become a total original.

There are no easy comparisons.

Now entering his 83rd year, this edge-of-society man

lives among the bulrushes in the County Antrim countryside

with his partner, Helen Falloon.

I would say my father is a very private man, a very generous man.

He's not so keen on authority.

He would toe the line, but he doesn't like to.

He likes to call a spade a spade,

and anybody that doesn't call a spade a spade

I don't think he has much time for.

Could you imagine yourself not being an artist?

At one time, I could.

But not really.

Not for years and years.

If you hadn't been an artist, what do you think you might have been?

A butcher!

Born in 1932 in Glengormley to an English farmer, Samson Blackshaw,

and mother Edith Clayton,

Blackshaw was reared at Boardmills in South Down

with horses, hounds and the countryside coursing through his veins.

Basil was a country boy

as opposed to having any association with the town.

However, he had gone to Methodist College

and he was there at the same time as I was, but he was

a couple of years behind me

and he then moved up into the art school.

Entering the Art College in Belfast at 16,

the precocious Blackshaw immediately made an impression on his teachers.

The leading influence would have been Romeo Toogood.

Now, Romeo Toogood had a theoretical capacity

to stylise the things that he was painting.

He recognised Basil's talent.

I remember one day he said to a group of us,

"Basil is the daddy of you all."

In other words, he was giving him his place

as the leading student.

Once you have got a very straight training,

you can allow that straight training

to put boundaries on your work,

the only breakthrough is

you've enough skills and experience...

..to be bold,

take risks.

Basil had got an award from Cema,

which was the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts.

I spoke a little French and Basil used to joke and say,

"All the French I have is, 'Avez-vous du wee saucepan?'"

We had a great time together in Paris,

we went to the Orangerie, the Louvre,

the Musee d'Art Moderne...

I have no doubt that what he saw in Paris went into

the totality of his experience.

One of the big early influences, you told me, was Cezanne.

What was it about Cezanne that so fascinated you?

I suppose everything that was good about Cezanne,

the lovely sense of space, and the relationship of one thing to another.

All I know is that it had some sort of effect on me,

that made me want to paint,

that made me want to make marks

and shapes and forms

and...get the elements up of art.

He's psychologically a country man through and through,

it's not a city man coming down the painting landscape,

as a release from busy city life,

he's absolutely in it organically and belongs there

and understands it.

It is almost his essence, in fact.

Simply because he is an artist of the countryside,

what he has produced as that is so immensely, intensely glorious,

he is so plugged into that huge, throbbing heart

of the natural world.

In 1959, Blackshaw married Anna Ritchie, an Australian artist.

Three years later their daughter Anya was born

at their Ravarnet home outside Lisburn.

He used to change my nappy on the sofa with ten dogs beside me.

So that is my first recollection of Ravarnet.

It was just chaos, with people coming

and going every day of the week.

There were dog men, vets, dogs, horses,

anything you could think of, there were lords, ladies,

painters... Crazy.

Both my mother and father,

they had 55 greyhounds in training, of other people's, and their own.

So it was between dogs and horses mainly.

That was just their life, that was all there was,

painting, dogs and horses!

I always knew our living situation

and our home situation was slightly different.

He obviously was so impressed by the environment

of which he was a part,

grooming horses and dogs, all that kind of thing,

that it was inevitable that a lot of his early work should reflect that.

These works are beautifully observed, he knows animals so well,

his natural sympathy with them,

they say he has power over the horses and dogs and so on.

But these are more than animals,

they're imbued with traits which are not of the animal kingdom,

which he puts into them.

He's clever, he gets the viewer into his own body,

you actually sense the landscape,

you sense the tonal qualities of the palette,

there's almost a sense of feeling the heartbeat of the animal

he's painting - so it's alive,

it's not stagnant.

If you follow any painter's career, you are known

for subjects,

but you're a painter first - it doesn't really matter.

You need something that would trigger your painterly response,

but it's the response that matters.

Blackshaw's marriage ended in 1972,

leading to a turbulent phase in his life.

During this period he gravitated more and more towards bouts of drinking.

Everybody crumbled when it came to the end of Ravarnet, really,

I moved to my old aunt's and uncle's,

and my father, he moved to his mother's house.

My mother stayed for a couple of years

and then moved back over to Australia.

It was at this time,

on a trip to Donegal, Blackshaw befriended another creative spirit.

We had a cottage in Donegal

where we used to spend all the summer

and somehow or other, Basil appeared.

We sort of liked each other.

And he needed, I think, somebody to talk to.

He had just broken up with his wife

and he was sort of... a little bit crazy,

a little bit depressed - quite a lot depressed.

I liked him. I liked him very much.

He was a very nice, decent man.

He did a lot of drinking, mind you!

We all went swimming in the nude one night, which was very funny.

And I expect we were all a bit pissed,

but we weren't seriously pissed.

The stars were in the sea, that wonderful thing that happens,

and when you lift up the water in your hands, it's like stars,

spilling out of your hands, back into the water again.

It was great.

To Jennifer Johnston, Blackshaw's gentle personality was at odds

with his interest in cockfighting and passion for blood sports.

The first story he told me about the cockfighting, I was outraged.

But he just laughed at me, he didn't pay any attention at all.

He would just go on telling you the stories

and then he would tell you another one the next time you saw him.

He was sort of two people, in a way.

One was the country man

and the other was this very sophisticated artist

who really knew what he was doing.

And yet he couldn't quite believe that he knew what he was doing.

In the early 1970s, Blackshaw would meet Helen Falloon.

They went to live outside Antrim town where they have resided ever since.

It was here that he set up his loft studio.

How can you explain that you seem to know everything that's

going on in the art world around the world

although you're stuck out here in County Antrim?

How does that happen?

There are so many magazines and so on about.

And books and so on.

-And TV.

-Yeah.

Just... Seeing what's happening.

Would you say that your studio was where you felt most at peace?

Probably one of the places, yes. Yeah.

Disaster struck in 1981 when Blackshaw's studio went on fire.

This would prove, however, a seminal moment for the artist.

As the '70s drew to a close, he had been growing increasingly

restless with his realistic painting and about the direction of his art.

I gather that studio fire destroyed works in the new style

and they were lost.

And of course it was a huge blow to his development.

But in a sense it gave him tabula rasa, cleared away the past.

It seemed to push Basil into a more challenging area,

a much more exciting area of paint,

where it didn't matter whether it was the dogs

or whether the tractors,

or the heads,

it was becoming... Really, the paint was taking over.

The paint was dictating where Basil was going.

The time the studio burnt down, at that time, I was painting

realistic landscape-type paintings that were getting nowhere.

You know, I could go and do the same thing all over again,

any day, it was going to be the same painting,

good painting, well painted, but it was nothing new.

Nothing exciting.

And when the studio burnt down,

it let me step back and see things as going nowhere.

Jude Stevens has been Blackshaw's model for more than 30 years.

Week after week she has climbed these steps into what is

a house of happy memories for her.

When I was sitting, this was the spot.

I would either stand or sit here,

Basil's easel would be about here,

and this was the famous stove with which we used to have problems,

but it certainly heated up, the stove, and it produced a lot of...

a certain smell, an evocative smell of this place which was amazing.

In this corner over here...

It's empty now,

but there used to be, at one stage, about six birdcages.

The studio always had a haze of dust

and the whole place had this kind of rugged, well-used feel to it,

which I loved, even though it was and still is quite bleak

and barren in some ways.

If we take Jude, your model, when she leaves the studio,

you scrub everything and then you start painting.

That seems an extraordinary thing to be doing. What's going on?

Well, it's part of the process

of making...

significant marks.

You want to get away from the making of the subject

that you knew was going to happen,

that you knew where you were going to work,

there's no point in it any more.

But is it better, the fact that she has gone, then?

Yeah, you can make a painting then.

I loved to watch Basil painting.

He always used to mention Muhammad Ali, and those famous words,

"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

And I think that's what he was doing.

He needed a lot of space to paint - leaping back from the canvas,

assessing where the next blow should be,

then jumping in with the paintbrush, jabbing at it, back again.

It was a battle.

I had never been painted by a real artist before

and I was absolutely mind-blown by it.

You couldn't see anything except his feet from the knees down,

and his toes were pointed in, like that.

And he kept wiggling his feet the whole time, it was really weird.

He used to fly around the room, it was nearly like dancing.

And I loved it, I used to sit in the background and watch him paint

for hours, but it was the energy,

he had so much energy when he painted.

He wriggled himself, and the little times you did see bits of him

come out from behind the canvas, he was sort of wriggling, like a worm,

like a big worm, a big, fat worm.

Sitting for Basil Blackshaw was an electrifying experience.

There was these rubbing and scraping noises.

Basil, in between bits of conversation,

was groaning and grunting

and saying how impossible it was

and that he'd never get it right.

He has a rare ability to capture a likeness,

but it's much more than a likeness.

It's the soul of the person,

and it's all of his experience of that person,

concentrated into one image.

And when you look at a Basil portrait,

you feel as though you have met that person

and that you're getting to know them.

When it comes to painting portraits,

people like Brian Friel, Jennifer Johnston etc,

what goes on in your mind?

Whatever feeling you get from them.

I mean, Jennifer Johnston was all this blonde hair and dark glasses,

which was the main point of that painting.

So just something like that would hold together

as you made the painting.

You did a very celebrated painting of Clint Eastwood,

which was made from bits of cardboard, bits of newspapers.

Why did you not simply paint a portrait of Clint Eastwood?

It didn't have any spirit or any excitement or anything like that.

Painting a portrait of Clint Eastwood was not going to be enough.

I mean, I had to do something that was a bit more exciting!

Like Ireland's best-known artist, Jack B Yeats,

Blackshaw, in his advancing years,

was still pushing the boundaries of his art,

trying to find new ways of expressing himself,

moving from the '80s into the '90s,

with a very noticeable step change from 2000 onwards.

I'm pretty sure he felt like,

"We've got to push the bound... We've got to move on.

"It's a journey we're on, we've got to move on."

He lost his inhibitions about facing a big picture.

He found he could do it.

In fact, Basil loves a big canvas now.

He's the only one in the country who can construct on a big scale.

The time suited - the new expressionism and all these

seemed to set him on fire.

He was never a follower of anybody.

But he was certainly influenced by new currents, I should think.

Any good artist is.

More and more, Blackshaw was now adding words

and scribbles to his canvas,

to the point of appearing naive.

I found that initially off-putting.

But, after a while, you get used to it

and you realise the lettering is part of the composition.

It was Duchamp, the Dada painter, who said,

"Titles are extra colours."

And, in this mysterious way,

Basil adds colour to his paintings with words.

Well, I think the marks of where you write,

or the scribbles you write, are part and parcel of the painting.

Would you feel the painting was right without those marks,

-without those scribbles? Without...?

-No.

Many people looking at your paintings might consider them childish,

in many ways. That's not an accident, is it?

Well, it partly is an accident.

Because I'm not conscious of... of, er...

being childish or wanting to be, or trying to be.

It's just part and parcel of it.

At the end of the '90s, it was obvious

that Blackshaw's work was growing more subjective in content.

The so-called Window series would carry Blackshaw

right out onto the ledge of abstraction.

When I saw those at the Ulster Museum,

I genuinely felt they were the greatest paintings

that I've seen produced in Ireland in my lifetime.

They're beautifully painted.

There's nothing to detract

from just the purity of the paint on the canvas.

They are not what you'd call welcoming or friendly pictures,

but they exercise their own hypnosis, I find.

And I think the result was enormously courageous,

in the sense that he seemed to be turning his back on what

he'd achieved and leaping off in another direction.

But then that's Basil Blackshaw - he's totally unpredictable.

If you've been brought up

on the early, more figurative pictures,

it must have seemed completely extraordinary

that he should fly off into something

that only he really understands,

but I can't but stand by those...

I mean, those Windows pictures are...

the greatest things he's ever done, for me.

I'm more aware of the presence of Basil in those Windows.

And how he feels about just being alive.

But I'm convinced that those are the best works that Basil...

ever did.

For the first time, I was able to use space,

the size of a canvas, for instance. The space...

To the emptiness of things,

to the emptiness of what's outside the window, which is a nothingness.

You don't see anything outside of my Windows.

They're just...blank spaces.

The Windows were a subject that was...

..nothing, in other words. It was...

the emptiness of things.

Would you accept that a certain bleakness entered some of your works?

Well, if you call bleakness, er...

a sense of space, empty spaces, or...

Those paintings I made of the empty rooms,

those are probably the bleakest paintings, I think.

A lot of the time, you work from visions.

From where do those concepts, ideas spring in your work?

A vision can be a piece of paper lying on the floor out there.

It can suggest a, um...

..a starting point. Anything can start a starting point.

So that's really it.

So are you telling me that if you rose from where you are now,

and you walked out the door and you bumped into it,

-that would trigger something which could end up on a canvas?

-Oh, yes.

It can happen at any time, anywhere, any day.

You never know when it's going to happen.

There's such a temptation in these days

to see everything in terms of movements,

and that's where Basil defies everything.

That's why he confounds us all.

If you want to see him in terms of a movement,

then you're on the wrong track. You're looking at the wrong man.

There is a delinquent streak in Basil Blackshaw,

which is hugely releasing and refreshing.

And an essential part of him.

He's a late blossomer.

But he stepped totally out of an Irish context.

You can't fit him into it.

He is as good as any painter in Europe that I know.

In the United Kingdom, I can't think he has any equal.

There are plenty of good painters in England -

some of them I greatly respect -

but they're not remotely of European stature, I would say.

Basil is.

He has such an individual...

look or take on the world

that we are privileged to have...

shared through his paintings,

his way of looking at the world.