To have the sheer effrontery to terminate your hallmark images, and seemingly change tack on a major scale, is the mark of a man who knows his own mind. Basil Blackshaw, appreciated by critics, collectors and the general public, is in his seventies. He’s already done enough to earn himself a secure listing in the route map of Irish art. Known and loved for his figurative studies of horses, dogs, game cocks and ‘doggie men’, his oeuvre, leavened by landscapes, nudes, and portraits, fits in perfectly with the traditional idea of the Irish Painter. He can be seen, with ease, as in distinct line of descent from the likes of Paul Henry, William Conor, Sean Keating and Dan O’Neill.

In many ways this is a highly misleading view, as the seeming Irishness of Blackshaw’s subject matter has always been suffused with a distinctly European crucible of painterly influences, resulting – even in relatively early works like The Field – in a technique which stresses a kind of all-over calligraphic cum gestural mark-making (Fig 11). This dialogue between representation and abstraction was quite tightly reined in until the later eighties and early nineties, when paintings such as The Barn (Fig 12) loosened the figurative grip, a process most probably stimulated by a cross fertilisation of 20th - century American influences, such as Rothko, with European ones such as De Stael and Baselitz.

As a recent visit to his studio triumphantly confirmed, Blackshaw has now moved decisively, and unexpectedly, into a magisterial late flowering. Most artists go downhill in old age, or effectively cease production. It is given only to a few to shift into a higher gear. One thinks of late Titian or Tintoretto, late Rembrandt, or closer to home, late Matisse. As art historian John Golding has noted, one of the hallmarks of a late style is an increasing interest in painterly concerns, resulting in an increasing freedom in terms of painterly gesture, not to mention a happy disregard for notions of unity or stylistic convention. Blackshaw, just like late Picasso, has negotiated a return to that blessed state of childhood – serious play.

His recent works are primarily large scale. The balance between abstraction and figuration has tipped in favour of abstraction and the matrix of influences is currently yielding up a dialogue with American painters ranging from the Abstract Expressionists to the Colour Field painters. In many ways Morris Louis, and specifically his The Golden Age, (which is in the Ulster Museum along with works by Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland), has provided an initial adrenalin. It is almost as if this septuagenarian painter has entered the lists, playfully taking on the Great Americans, measuring himself against them, learning from them, and making them his own.

On one level it is a dangerous and dodgy business. There is always the risk of what Robert Hughes once called ‘a medium-sized pictorial idea writ large’. Louis, as opposed to Pollock, explored an elegant impasse, but unlike Louis’ impersonal nuances, Blackshaw triumphantly integrates the expressive hand, holding on to the legacies of Cézanne (the spaces between objects are as palpable as the objects themselves) and like Arshile Gorky developing a compositional syntax in which the surface of the painting becomes a terrain or field over which the painter, by turns ploughman or harvester, ranges freely. It is a kind of free association where the acquired instinct and skill of a lifetime create overall colouristic and spatial harmonies in a very honed pictorial abstraction. The effect on the viewer, in works such as Window or Yellow Rabbit (Fig 4) is a sense of liberation, an amused enjoyment at the sheer pleasure of existence, which in paintings such as Nightrider (Fig 2), Graham and Jude (Fig 8) or V.A.T., explodes into an effervescent ironic humour as well as an optical exhilaration. (V.A.T. is a deadpan taking-the-piss out of Her Majesty’s Inspectors while Nightrider is a gloriously batty assembly of every Western movie cliché you’ve ever seen, perched half way between affectionate homage and playful irony, the whole cauled together in a bravado demonstration of surface mastery).

Blackshaw has often been called, quite wrongly, an intuitive painter. Matisse, for example, often emphasised the importance of intuition but what he wanted was the effect of spontaneity, an effect that was always carefully calculated. Blackshaw is the same. It is the appearance of spontaneity in the late works that is important, the manner in which the organisation of the picture surface plays off thick paint as against thin, flat areas against broken ones, more or less naturalistic colour against distinctly non-naturalistic colour. This is a man who has learnt that he was once too close to his subject matter; a man who would love to be an abstract painter but is not; a man who can make scale, surface and the emotional temperature of colour coalesce; a man who has learnt to avoid the slick or clever brushstroke, or the purely descriptive brushstroke in favour of a painter’s marks. The poet Ted Hughes once wrote about the difficulties of making marks on a blank white sheet. The triumph of Blackshaw – and the mark of major work – is the seeming effortlessness with which he has made lucid marks on a primed canvas.

Basil is dangerous. There is an immediate warmth to the man, which even transmits itself over the telephone. But he is definitely ‘country’ and ‘cute’ as my neighbours would say. Getting instructions from him as to how to reach his place is like being given commandments in Arabic – you need to have faith and pray – especially as he does not tend to give you street names, preferring description of the variety ‘take the second turn on the left, and you’ll come to a crossroads. Well, it’s not really a crossroads but you’ll recognize it anyway’ and so forth. Naturally, being of this cast of mind myself, I make my way straight there, but God help those who might want a map. The studio; theoretically a converted barn, is close to the house and nestled up the mountainside with splendid glimpses of Lough Neagh (Fig 6). Unless you have a beagle dog, do not try and find your way out, or in, unaided. Basil himself, in the nicest possible sense, is shambolic. This is, of course, part character trait and part artist’s camouflage. He has, as Jamie Oliver would say, a wicked sense of humour, but so have I, so that’s all right. The studio floor is littered with enough spent matches to make a model schooner and the bits of carpet that attempt to cover the studio floor have all the finesse of a local farmer stuffing bed boards and old baths into gaps in a hedge. Fifty yards away, in the house, the world of Basil and his partner Helen is immaculate, comfortable and convivial. The juxtaposition is not accidental.

In the studio, there are racks of paintings, and more turned to the wall. A stove, two easels, a hanging white sheet behind one of the easels, Brigitte Bardot (well, a poster of her on the back of the door which has taken on a life of its own), a jumble of tins, paintbrushes, odds and ends, not to mention the dog. I am beginning to have memories of Three Men in a Boat, not forgetting the dog Montmorency…. Somebody told me that Basil was difficult to talk to but I was there for over seven hours and I did not notice the time. But one should always keep the best bit for the last – the best bit is that I got to see a whole raft of new paintings and they are the best things he has ever done.

Brian McAvera: Various writers have described your childhood in the country in squirarchical terms, but according to Mike Catto your roots were rather humbler. Tell us about your childhood.
Basil Blackshaw: My father was an Englishman and my mother was from County Tyrone. Father always worked with horses, kept them. He had a livery stable and that was his life. I was born in Glengormley House, County Antrim, which he’d rented and which was on the edge of the mountain. He then found better stabling at Boardmills in County Down. We never had any money. There was no such thing as grandeur! We always felt outsiders. There were only farm horses there. People didn’t know about thoroughbreds, hunters and beagles (Fig 10). We counted as an odd bunch. I never felt part of anything.
My father painted, little oils and watercolours. He thought Percy French was a marvellous painter… He did a smashing little painting of a bay horse. It has the same horizontal compositional lines, suggestive of landscape, that I’ve used many times. I lost it in the fire. [A major studio fire in 1985 destroyed much of Basil’s work] I’d paint hunting scenes. When I went to art school and began to change, my mother went along with it, even when I was experimenting with practically abstract stuff. My parents never discouraged me. Not a lot of encouragement…but I was always associated with horses. I was riding when I was three or four years old and soon hunting.

BMcA: As you’ve said, your father was an amateur watercolourist. Did he encourage you to paint? And when did you first become aware that ‘art’ was your field?
BB: I can’t put any time on that whatsoever! I never made decisions. Things just seemed to happen! Not like the younger ones today! It seemed natural to me to go on painting and drawing – a part of my life. In terms of the art college, enquiries were probably made by my father. I was painting wee commissions when I was about ten. The oil man for instance. He sold paraffin oil. A green lorry with a tank on back. He was quite the showman type, jaunty, with an angled hat and a flashy tie. He asked me would I paint him and his oil lorry: McMinn and His Lorry..... I did a watercolour. Once, I went with my father on the bus to Seaforde to paint a mare – another commission. Got five pounds! A large amount then (Basil was born in 1932) This was long before I went to art school. And there was the odd farmer who wanted his farm horse painted.

BMcA: In 1966 the critic Robert Hughes famously lambasted the Royal Academy of London, acidly commenting that their last great period was during the presidency of Sir Alfred Munnings, famous for the brio of his horse paintings, and equally famous for the vehemence of his attacks on the ‘degeneracy’ of modern art. Your early work was very influenced by him. What did you gain from him? And how do you view him now?
BB: Probably then, long before I’d formed any opinions on art, Munnings was a big thing for me. I thought his horses were wonderful. Now it’s a bit different. There are so many painters who can paint well, but have no vision. Munnings became slick, and pleasing to the grand English society people who hunted. He’s of no interest to me any more. I much prefer his sketches and wood panels and the less slick early paintings. They were good academic paintings. He developed clever, but slick, brushmarks, marks of description rather than painter’s marks. Do you remember Franz Marc’s Red Horses? Now that’s the only horse painting that had an influence on me!

BMcA: Can you indicate the patterns of your normal working day – how you approach the making of a painting, the kinds of brushes you use and so forth?
BB: If people saw the way I work they’d faint! The best paintings just happen, as with the Paper Flowers group. It was one miserable Saturday morning, raining..I looked at what I’d done. There was a pot of white paint sitting nearby so I jabbed a brush into it, scumbled the area, and suddenly it had a presence. I made the painting in ten minutes after working on it for a week! Suddenly an excitement happens and life comes into an image. I don’t come in at ten in the morning unless I have something going.
There was a big painting of cardboard flowers that I’d been working on for ages. I was going to Australia so I left it turned against a wall. The day I came home from Australia I turned it round, lifted a brush and it happened! (This was the painting shown in the last Rosc at the Hop Store and auctioned in Dublin).
I could never paint a still life. I wasn’t interested, until once Helen [his partner], being in Scotland, and it being dreary old wintertime, I thought I’d gather a few flowers. But I couldn’t find any. So I stuck pieces of cardboard into a tin and painted them. There they are (pointing to the cardboard flowers in a tin, in the studio). She was pleased that I’d made something for her. I took a photo of them, liked it so much I got the urge to start these images, twenty or thirty of them, of cardboard flowers…
That’s been the process since. I want to be divorced a bit from the actual subject; not to make a replica but to make an equivalent. I remember drawing ash trees, from a window, in the early morning. In fact I painted quite a few paintings of ash trees which didn’t look like ash trees..but as things in their own right.
That big pale thing we’re looking at now [He’s pointing to a large painting on the easel], it came from being up at Muckamore Abbey, where the disturbed people are. They had a wee art show the other day. As I was walking out I glimpsed a little row of pots and yellow flowers that they had made. I knew if I looked at it, it would be too clear. I’d see too much of it. But I knew something would come from that glimpse. So I painted a little one–the glimpse–it’s not saying anything (Fig 5). This one: it’s the twilight world of that existence there [in Muckamore Abbey]. Each painting has to have its own rightness of surface: a wash of acrylic; a tenseness at the edge; the bars across the top of the painting. There’s no reason. I never work things out intellectually. I feel it’s the enclosure. It’s the sensation I felt from that situation in Muckamore.
The more recent paintings are all about that notion of the sensation. I could never paint in series. Often thought it would be nice to go to the Glens of Antrim and do a series that would be different from those of Humbert Craig or Maurice Wilks for example. I’ve even gone up there with a sketchbook in hand but it doesn’t work for me. Sometimes though, I do several on the same theme… To me the excitement of painting is that you can never know where it’s coming from. You can’t go out looking for it. It can happen with a word, a glimpse, or an abstract feeling. Painting to me is just living. You can walk out on a nice morning, it’s smashing, and then you get a phone call and everything has changed.
Things can live in your mind for so long! I lived in a barrel type wagon, in Ardglass, for two years, and then went to Monaghan in it. The roar of the iron-shod wheels became hypnotic. Along the bushy Monaghan roads, I heard a man playing a mouth organ. It epitomised the day: an old boy in front of a wooden hut playing the mouth organ. It stayed in my mind for thirty-five years. Then I painted it. It’s called Hut in Monaghan. Vincent Ferguson has it.
When I was a child, about twelve, I used to travel between Ballynahinch and Downpatrick. Opposite Drumaness Lake there used to be a [tall] chimney. At one point along the road there were two bumps of the Mournes. I’d wait for the chimney to come into the dip of the mountain so that it appeared to be between them. Forty years later, I started making paintings of mountain and chimney. Ferguson has one. [There is another one in the painter’s house] I found myself drawing a line across the top of the image, a pencil line, in all of these paintings. I wondered one day if that was because I had been looking at the image through a car window and the line was that of the window…

BMcA: You are (or were) primarily a painter of country and country life, especially ‘country’ in the sense of ‘far from the town’. It is a world of fighting cocks, greyhounds, horses, gypsies, ‘doggie’ men, and especially a world of the rural Irish landscape, which you have inhabited since childhood (Fig 7). How far do you think the Irish climate – mizzling rain, mists, a water sodden atmospheric envelope, hills and valleys seen against banks of cumulus clouds scraked by ribbons of blue sky – affects the work that you (and others like T P Flanagan and Patrick Collins) produced?
BB: Don’t know! I’m sure it’s had a big effect. Things are there without me analysing...it is why people call me an intuitive painter, but I’m not. I have to think about the subject and let it build in my imagination. Do I like the Irish weather? Yes! I love the Dundrod fields and their mists, love the Monaghan fields with the sounds of the hounds…so it’s bound to be there. You know that Kavanagh poem, Standing by a Garage in Monaghan. You only need the title! Standing in a doorway, some oul fella saying ‘Bad oul weather for the hay, eh boy?’ The muck and the dirt and bits of pieces of iron and you don’t know what for! I love all that sort of thing.
I used to read quite a bit. Not any longer – just the racing page mainly! I get so angry about politicians, greed, the destruction of the boglands...so I suppose I follow local politics...I do read about what’s going on – and I get very cross!

BMcA: Where I come from, in County Down, the sense of place is a sense of personality. The fields have names, and the townland names were always used, whether the Post Office liked it or not. Folk memory travels back way beyond the 19th century. It is also an archaeological land as well as a farmer’s land, honeycombed with souterrains, laced with the evidence of successive invasions – Viking, Norman, Elizabethan. I imagine that your response to the land is somewhat similar. Could you talk us through some parts of the areas where you live and tell us about how these areas have manifested themselves in your work?
BB: Don’t forget I’m a County Down person too! I’m a blow-in in County Antrim. At one point I thought I could never bear to live in Antrim. County Down has been the major makeup in my life, especially Dromara country. I used to ride horses for The Major. His place was my second home. And I was a big mate of The Cowboy who lived on top of The Rib. [As an aside: Why do they have to bring in posh English names like ‘Bradbury Court’ in new developments. Awful!]
So long as I can have a glimpse of Slieve Croob and Lough Neagh, I feel at home. I’m a home person…familiar landscapes (Fig 9). I went to Australia and thought I’d get some painting done there – came home with one drawing! Though I did do some paintings later, having met the drovers out there. I could never go to a place and just start making paintings. The place creeps back in its own form. I did some paintings of Frazer Island, in a tombstone shape, which was because of the stories, I’d heard about the hunting parties for the Aborigines.
Landscape creeps in unconsciously (Fig 3). I haven’t been doing Landscapes for a long time now. The last ones were really the Red and Blue Barns, which were based on the merest glimpse from a car. A year or so later I painted the barns. A couple of years later I was passing on the same road and when I looked at it, wasn’t it the most miserable, nondescript building! How did it happen?
Something clicks and an image comes in its own time. Scale, surface, and general feel of colour – they all come simultaneously. Then a painting can be made.

BMcA: Looking at your landscape work of the fifties, for example The Field or Dromara landscape it is difficult not to see the influence of an English landscape painter like Alan Reynolds – for example the Tate’s Summer Young September’s Cornfield – particularly in its blend of traditional subject matter and a fairly easily deciphered space combined with a very modern, very virtuosi mark making. It is the move towards gestural abstraction, towards the appreciation of painterly surface for its own sake; towards a tactile sensuality where the canvas becomes the field and the artist the ploughman...the plough as palette knife, finger and loaded brush...uncovering the new earth and remaking the field...destroying the old to create the new. The more extreme developments of this in terms of colour, abstraction and gestural sweep would be Peter Lanyon or Alan Davie in the UK, or late Pollock in the USA. It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to see the Barn Series arising out of this kind of matrix. Would you agree with the comment about Reynolds, and were you aware of ploughing the furrow ever more deeply (as opposed to ploughing different furrows so to speak) in the journey from the 1950s landscapes to paintings such as the 1991 Blue Barn or the 1992 Big House?
BB: Reynolds did have an effect on me at the time. In those landscapes, the paintings then were of specific landscape – now they’re to enhance a sensation, a mood or a feeling. In that early painting (The Field) I knew exactly where there was a gap in the barbed wire. I knew every bush and ditch. I once saw 15 hares sitting on that mound in the morning. The beagles were nearby. When we left, the hares left. If they get the odd chase, it keeps them fit...the weaklings are killed. That’s what good hunting does. I’ve hunted with lurcher dogs all my life. The true sport is with a single dog. The hares you get are the weaker ones. It keeps the breeding strong. Hunting only replaces the natural predator.
The Barn paintings were a joy to paint. I was so excited by sweeps of blues and reds, I couldn’t get one finished quickly enough to get to the other...maybe two a day. The more recent paintings are more deliberate maybe. I did away with that exuberance of gesture and nice juicy paint because the subject matter wouldn’t work for me. In a sense I have become more austere. I want paint to be saying more now.
To be in the mood of what I feel about a thing. [Referring to the current painting on the easel] I couldn’t paint that thing in the way the Barns were painted. It’s ploughing the furrow more deeply...if you don’t be finding, or maintain, the excitement of a vision [then you’ve had it!]
You just go on making paintings. I want there to be more marks of a sensation or a mood. I’m doing away with the exuberant stuff to get closer to mood.

BMcA: Stripping away to find the essence?
BB: Exactly! If you don’t take chances there’s no point. To me painting isn’t worth doing otherwise. It has to be a challenge. There’s pictures I painted for money. You have to. I’ve painted far too many pleasing paintings. Job paintings. They make me cringe with embarrassment. They turn up at auctions now and make big money.
You know…once I came in here and made paintings from pure rage! The only social comment works I’ve ever made! They’re called Victor, Arthur, and Trevor, portraits of typical little office men…

BMcA: Like Neil Shawcross (and to a certain extent Jack Crabtree) portrait painting is not a necessary activity for you; more one initially prompted by commissions. There is also a sense, again as with Shawcross, of being more concerned with creating an interesting image than with an exploration of physiognomy or psychology. How do you view portraiture now; and have your attitudes changed since, say, the early commissions from ACNI in the seventies?
BB: To me now, portrait painting is a nuisance. I paint portraits for money – a few I’ve liked as paintings. I enjoyed them at times, trying to make them essentially painterly, but you have to get a good likeness. I wouldn’t paint them much now. One that I really liked was one of Douglas Gagesby [ex-editor The Irish Times]. I painted two of them. The one I like is the one that hangs in the offices of The Irish Times. I really enjoyed painting that. It’s one of the best, commissioned portraits that I’ve made. I also liked painting Mary Robinson. I had visualised her and how she would sit. When she came in, she sat in exactly the position I had in mind! I made several attempts at Stephen Rea but they didn’t work out. Oh, and I made a quick one of Felim Egan! I remember painting John Hewitt and it had Kafka on the back of it!

BMcA: Dan O’Neill, George Campbell and Gerard Dillon were all Romantics as John Hewitt noted, though in terms of influence he might have added Graham Sutherland and the Neo-Romantics in England. Do you recognize this lineage, and do you see yourself, hard-headed countryman that you are, as in any sense a romantic?
BB: I think so. I don’t think that O’Neill and the boys got the praise that they should have. They opened the public’s eyes. We knew Paul Nash, Nevinson, Wilson Steer and so on as students. We didn’t realize that painting could be as free and as open as Dillon and O’Neill made it. I knew O’Neill better than any of them.
Dan, being a drinking man like myself, painted some pictures that weren’t so good, but at his best he did something that hadn’t been done here before. I remember the nude that the Ulster Museum owns [oil on panel c.1972-73]. It’s a seated nude in a romantic background – one of my big likes at the time. I liked Dillon’s work best when he painted the island pictures, the ones of life in the West. They were more direct. I have to have some emotional connection with the subject so…[I suppose I am] romantic. There’s not a landscape I’ve painted that I haven’t had a connection with.

BMcA: In a sense Colin Middleton is an anthology of often naked influences, worn so to speak upon the sleeve of the paint. Commentators have cited an equally eclectic, not to say bewildering range of your influences, ranging from Courbet, Manet and Cézanne, through the German Expressionists, topped up with The School of Paris c. 1940 and following (Giacometti and co.), The New York School c. 1950 onwards as with Rothko, the more Northern of the International School from the sixties onwards (Baselitz, Penck etc.), while I myself would see De Stael, de Kooning and Dubuffet!
Now artists are often spectacularly good at deflecting attention from those they really admire, usually divided into those from whom they can steal (unacknowledged) to those whom they wish to emulate but for temperamental reasons are not in sympathy with (acknowledged). So, over the course of a long career, what artists have been of benefit, and what artists of no benefit, but admired?
BB: Influences are big in my case! I can see paintings I love but they don’t affect me. Cézanne is the biggest influence: the Cézanne thoughts still persist… Nearly all my paintings are put out on a stage. Like Cézanne you are not invited into them. That still exists: you can’t walk into my paintings.
Stubbs for example was a wonderful painter. People talk about him as a great animal artist but he’s a great classical painter – the greatest of the English – but he’s of no great benefit to me. Any painter that I can use, I will. Some bad painters are as good for me as great ones. It’s a glimpse of things; again…[Referring to two large paintings of rabbits] the Rabbits came from a certain yellow in a television ad (Fig 4).
Giacometti is another great influence and so is Turner. I saw Giacometti’s work in Paris, mainly the paintings. His construction of figures was interesting to me: as he said ‘the way the head sat on the shoulders’. I knew the Douglas Gagesby portrait would work if I got ‘the shoulder line to the head’ right. I like the physical things in Giacometti: his paintwork and the feeling that it was a piece of work, an exploration, not a work made for exhibition.
Francis Bacon I admired for his way of painting. People would say to me ‘I couldn’t live with those Screaming Heads but I didn’t see the subject matter – it’s the painting! - all I’m interested in is what happens of the canvas. Beuys you know was full of theories and philosophies, but he had a beautiful line. It’s like people who know everything about technique saying ‘this colour will fade’. If you look at their own paintings, the sooner they fade the better! One grudge that I have about a lot of painters is that they don’t take chances.
I love graffiti on walls, get more inspiration from that than anything else! Used to go cockfighting on the border. There was a garage where the boys kept cleaning their brushes on the wall. That was a great piece of imagery!

BMcA: The Expressionist aspect of your work seems to have lots of sources. Hewitt mentioned Kokoschka in relation to your early portraits. If one looks at the 1965 portrait of Anna on a Sofa, that shows unmistable signs of Francis Bacon. How do you view Expressionism? Is it an instinctive ‘pull’ on you as an artist?
BB: I think it’s instinctive. I lean towards that, more than any other kind of painting. In the recent ones I’ve been thinking about things more – a layered sort of meaning now. Yes, you’d be right: it’s American rather than European influences. I love the Morris Louis [in the Ulster Museum], it’s smashing. I love the fact that the Americans used scale and technique to every inch of advantage. Their technical marriage with the image was wonderful – they made very complete paintings.
I liked some of de Kooning’s landscapes very much. Not so keen on the later de Koonings which are too sweet. And I was very influenced by Bernard Buffet for a while. I saw the Self Portrait by him, which is in the Tate: a cracking painting! Those empty streets! I love paintings where there’s not too much in…

BMcA: You became the image-maker for Brian Friel’s company Field Day, doing the posters for their productions. This was somewhat ironic as Field Day had an avowedly political purpose and you were and are the most apolitical of artists. It was also a little surprising in the sense that theatrical drama is not what would spring to mind when one thinks of your work. As you said earlier, you do not walk into your paintings. So what attracted you to this continuing engagement, and what if anything did you get out of it?
BB: I did the first one because Brian Friel asked me too. I knew him. He would always send me a script and then he’d phone about a month afterwards. ‘I suppose you haven’t read it yet’ he’d say. And I’d agree with him!
The first one was the worst. I hadn’t a clue about posters. They were fun to do. There was an excitement. I felt free. I could do as I wanted. It opened me up a bit: the thought of them [the paintings] being reproduced as posters gave a new slant to things. But I hadn’t a clue as to what the process was after I had painted them. Don’t know why I was asked, other than knowing Brian.
Brian McAvera is a playwright, art critic and curator.