Basil Blackshaw HRUA HRHA (1932-2016) Black Mountain, or Divis (1964) Oil on canvas, 90.

Basil Blackshaw HRUA HRHA (1932-2016) Black Mountain, or Divis (1964) Oil on canvas, 90.5 x 121cm (35¾ x 47¾'')Provenance: Collection of Patrick McCoy, Belfast, artist and friend of Blackshaw.Exhibited: Belfast, Ormeau Baths, 'Basil Blackshaw Retrospective', 1995; travelling to Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy; Cork, Crawford Municipal Gallery; Arts Council of Northern Ireland, labels verso Literature: Brian Ferran, Basil Blackshaw, Belfast, Nicholson & Bass 1995, illus. p. 24, pl. 14 as 'Divis'.In the early 1960s, Basil Blackshaw moved to a cottage outside Lisburn, and this change of location seems to have provided the impetus for a series of paintings based on a single motif, that was to occupy him for much of the next decade. The landscape looking across the valley towards Divis and the Black Mountain became a vehicle for technical experimentation at a crucial period in Blackshaw’s work, and the process of these works seems to have facilitated a greater move towards abstraction.The formal reduction that is a feature of these paintings shows the continuing influence of Cézanne (Blackshaw had already used his paintings of the gardener, Vallier, as a starting-point for paintings in the mid-1960s), whose obsessive return to the same landscape also mirrors Blackshaw’s way of working at this time. His suggestion of space through defining the receding planes, and the manner in which these were inter-connected to retain tension within the picture itself, in addition to establishing a relationship to the flat plane of the canvas, recalls Kenneth Jamison’s comment that this series of paintings, are ‘abstract in the truest sense’, and ‘are perhaps the artist’s finest achievements to date.’Blackshaw’s career contained a number of significant, self-contained groups of work, focussed on a specific subject, a way of working which reveals something of his nature as a painter, and his conviction that an artist could reveal an essential truth about some element of the world around us; his seriousness conveys something of the heroic impossibility of this task. The technical range across this Divis / Black Mountain series is intriguing to watch; in one canvas, almost every intervention of the painter on the canvas, with the exception of a handful of marks, has been over-painted in white, while in the present work, the palette is unusually varied, and the marks Blackshaw has made demonstrate how instinctive and detailed his approach to this particular motif remained, even after years of examining it.Dickon Hall, April 2025