Brian Blanchflower

Brian Blanchflower is one of a handful of painters in the world today who is prepared to take on the big questions.  Painting still outnumbers most visual art forms with the possible exception of photography but much of it is repetitive, rhetorical, illustrative or merely decorative.  We cannot all be reaching for the stars but thank god some still do!  It is frustrating therefore that Blanchflower is barely recognised in Eastern Australia and virtually unknown overseas.

In the early 1980s when I was working at the art Gallery of Western Australia Daniel Thomas asked me why I had included a token West Australian in the touring exhibition Twelve Australian Painters? I assured him that it was because Brian�s work stood up extremely well in this context and that he should take a closer look. Daniel in his typically meticulous professional style made a pilgrimage to Western Australia after which he pronounced that Blanchflower was in fact one of the 10 best painters ever to work in Australia.  I might personally venture one of the 10 most interesting modern painters in the world.

What are these big questions that Blanchflower manages to treat with in his paintings?   Nothing less I would suggest than the void made implicit (I am almost ready to say manifest) in matter.  I am thinking about the void in a Gnostic sense something like the darkness before the word and the light.   It may be easier just to think of the sky and infinity or what lies over the horizon but the void is never an absence it is the potential for everything and as such a space for meditation as well as terror.  Human consciousness is utterly dependent on and bound up with material existence and yet it too refuses definition or spatial coordinates, it is as if we have a void within that is the double of the void out there. How can mortals contemplate the infinite?  Our sensory equipment is not intended for this quest and yet we desire to experience it and will try anything to get some inkling of its totality.  The artist may just be the conduit through which matter is transformed even if only momentarily into a medium for joining these voids through sensation in consciousness.

There is an extraordinary history of allegorical and metaphorical imagery that �speaks� about such things but for some visual artists the greatest challenge is to make something that can convey a degree of equivalence between the thing they make and feeling the idea, not an image but the sensation of transcendence.  This quest may take many paths and depends upon the artist�s negotiation of the relationship between the mind and matter.  For the viewer it is also necessary to be able to allow their imagination to enter the space created by the artist and to visualise or experience the immaterial.  The progression of day-to-day instrumentalities tends to prevent us from taking time out to feel the slower rhythms of being.  Like meditation art takes time and effort but it is sometimes worth it.

Agnes Martin proposes her minimal grids on white as quiet interludes that slow down the rush of consciousness by providing a space for contemplation.  The content of the experience here must rely heavily on the mind and spirit of the viewer.   Yves Klein�s blue monochromes provide pure sensation of the colour that he believed constituted a material manifestation of the void.  Something similar happens with Rothko except that his spaces are imbued with emotion.  Rothko like Klein railed against expressionism (self expression) but was unable to keep his spirit out of the work, nonetheless his paintings seem to ignite a fire in the viewer�s heart through the artist�s pain and joy.

Blanchflower�s paintings often include references to specific worldly sites and to the experience of the sky�s canopy in other words they are grounded in the material world but many of his most recent works open a portal onto the infinite while leaving the nature of the journey to the individual viewer.   This is not to say the void is a blank.   Contemplation of the void can take mundane forms such as our widely shared wonder at the horizon where the known gives way to the imagined or at the magnitude of space in landscapes and in the sky at night.  There is communality here even if what beckons for some might be a cause for terror in others, it is nevertheless something substantial in human consciousness.  The artwork invites us on a journey without promising a definitive destination, it is setting out that matters.

Blanchflower began his long dialogue with the infinite as a student when he walked the English countryside following ancient spiritual paths that link the standing stones set in place by Neolithic astronomers.  The pilgrimage kept him out at night camping at Stonehenge or in the Orkney Isles so already the nocturnal sky was making a deep impression on him.  The stones however are themselves extraordinary testimony of man�s early philosophical commitment to binding the infinite in some concrete form.   The stones are arranged to act as calendars almost certainly to help with cyclical agricultural practices and certainly these sites would have been profoundly sacred.  The community�s survival literally depended on them but by revealing the movements of the universe they also implied a certain control over nature by conscious mind.   The designers had tapped into extraordinary power.  For me the most marvellous thing is that spiritual mysteries and profound phenomenological issues are founded on the most fundamental process of mucking about with soil.  This is an important metaphor for me when trying to understand the transformations brought about by art.

Blanchflower�s wanderings often took him past Oxford where he took time out to look at the collection of works by Samuel Palmer at the Ashmolean Museum.   Palmer�s nocturnes in particular inspired him and stayed part of his visual memory throughout his life.  Palmer was another of the artists who have sought to manifest something atmospheric and spiritual into the nature of the image rather than to simply represent it pictorially.  Like Blake he found mysterious power within the forms of everyday objects in the landscape and his paintings invest the forms with this power.

The first paintings of Blanchflower�s that I am aware of were flat monochrome panels that are similar in appearance and date to the radical experiments that the Australian pioneer of Conceptual art Ian Burn was making in London in the late 1960s.  The two never met then but this was a time when phenomenology gave birth to conceptual art.  It was a time when such issues were impossible for an artist in Europe to avoid.  Questions about the nature of being and the limits of representation were the staples of conversation in pubs and universities alike.  Blanchflower made his monochromes as a part of a performance work on the beach at Brighton.  He placed them along the pebbly foreshore and photographed them there.  The scale and colour intensity of the images constituted an optical experiment with space.   He was in effect manifesting a conjunction of ideas and the sensible world.  This is where Blanchflower parted company with conceptual art.

In the years to come he often made reference to his walks and to the sacred sites that so influenced his early development.  This took the form of paintings of rocks and lunar surfaces and at one time he conducted rituals celebrating the solstice by pouring sacrificial honey over an industrial monolith accidentally exposed by a road construction in Perth but his experiments never led him towards the dematerialisation of the object, on the contrary he always celebrates the material even as he seeks to prize from it the latent meaning of the cosmos.

Looking at his recent works I have found no difficulty in proposing a direct lineage for Blanchflower that comes down from Palmer through Monet�s late water lily paintings to Rothko�s dark meditations on the infinite, here in Blanchflower a similar space is being conjured.  Consider Monet�s water lily paintings.  All our spatial coordinates are disoriented, there is no ground beneath our feet and the horizon is excluded from view so that everything is reflected in the water or is an effect of light upon the it.  Yet Monet does not deal in optical illusions, his paint is totally insistent as material we are somehow invited to experience space while always having the primordial stuff of paint asserting its presence.  This is the quality I also find most extraordinary in Blanchflower.  It is not entirely a modernist concern either. In the 19th century and even in some form since the early Renaissance the exciting proposition that the artist is somehow able to manifest the appearance of consciousness out of the material stuff of paint has been close to the heart of visual art.  Originating as a humanist defence against the iconoclasts by defining the image as a product of human virtuosity rather than an index of the scared, the idea grew into a richer contemplation of the processes of making and perceiving.

Blanchflower�s near monochromes since the late 1990s generate an extraordinary sense of space and intense yet subdued light that invite visual absorption.  It is as if we could almost walk into their mist and emerge in Monet�s garden or in some unimaginable void.  And yet they are intensely material objects. They are painted on coarse hessian sheets that have been stiffened with binder till they are like boards.  The paint layers are then built up almost as if they were accidental accretions revealing the coarse support and successive layers of colour.  The paint includes metallic and pearlescent media that glint like minerals in the soil but also contribute to the transparency and inner light that the surface radiates at certain viewing distances.  As one approaches the paintings the surface comes to dominate the attention they are like the rocky surface of the earth itself and yet as you retreat the colour transforms back into infinite space.   For me this is the most marvellous manifestation of infinity in the mud.  In the late 1970s his paintings made reference to the surfaces of prehistoric monoliths and to the inscription on their surfaces representing configurations of the stars.  In many ways these recent works take the illustrative quality out of the earlier paintings and manifest the idea more completely as seeing rather than reading.

Artists who aim impossibly high may sometimes fall short of their target.  Anselm Kiefer is an extraordinary example.   His experiments regularly fail spectacularly because he obeys no workable conventions as a result
He always has hundreds of unsatisfactory works awaiting recycling in the studio.   Blanchflower is not as radical technically as Kiefer but the subtlety of the works may not always be immediately accessible to a casual observer.   While Kiefer strives to make the same journey between the material and the spiritual he often falls back on esoteric signs and literary devices for all the massive materiality of the work.  Blanchflower has increasingly eliminated the signs leaving us with an invitation to imagine.  I only mention this because if you have only seen one or two works and find none of the qualities I am describing here have patience give them time and keep looking, the rewards are great because when he does pull it off he can liberate the human soul even if only for a moment!  Only the safely mediocre always succeed and Blanchflower is certainly not mediocre.

Anthony Bond
Head Curator
Art Gallery of NSW