David Blackburn (artist)

His friends included the playwright David Halliwell, whose play Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs was loosely based on the students who attended the college, and the children's television personality Wilf Lunn.

Although he was initially based in the Textile Department, students were encouraged to move between areas, and Blackburn quickly found himself drawn to the more subtle challenges of landscape art, a slightly unfashionable subject at the time.

[4] Blackburn was unmoved by the playful aesthetic of such trends, preferring instead the quieter visions of landscape artists such as Gerhart Frankl and Prunella Clough, the former of whom went on to become a major influence and personal friend.

During his time in Australia, he was deeply affected by the work of Fred Williams,[6] who helped him to develop an understanding of space away from the 'European concept of foreground, middle distance and background', which he increasingly came to regard as 'irrelevant'.

[9] In 1981, Blackburn took up a position as a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington D.C.[10] At this time he became influenced by the vertical perspectives of the American cityscape, and began to experiment with electronic imagery and collage techniques.

However, after this short period of experimentation Blackburn realised that his 'inner life was based in the natural world, not the city',[11] and subsequently embarked on a complex and long-running sequence of transcendent pastel drawings known as the Landscape Vision series.

Coupled with Blackburn's interest in capturing the process of transformation is a desire to 'express an inner vision in terms of an external reality',[21] a pursuit of the sublime which lends his work a 'beauty of ineffable inner radiance', to quote Sister Wendy Beckett.

New vivid blocks of colour which took up large portions of the canvas began to appear, along with less literal representations of the environment; often in these works, trees and rocks are suggested, only for the image to transform into a micro close-up of the ground or a sweeping aerial vista overhead, a trend which would go on to be a defining feature of his artistic vision.

Blackburn described his interest at this time in capturing what he defined as the 'visual geometry'[26] of the cityscape, using the vertical impulse of the skyscraper to explore new methods of representing space in contrast to the blank expanse of the Australian bush.