Still Life, Summer
- Artist:
- Type: Painting
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Production Date: 1963
- Description: Elizabeth Blackadder is perhaps best known for her detailed yet lyrical watercolours of flowers, "table-top" compositions using Oriental objects, and her beloved cats. This is a typical example of one of her 'flattened' paintings with no perspective. 'The implied space of abstract painting, without conventional pictorial structure, allowed her, using an almost empty canvas or sheet of paper, to assemble a variety of objects in a free and seemingly random association. These representational elements provide a schema, but the painting is a poem built around them with its own internal logic'. (Duncan MacMillan in Scottish Art 1460-1990, p394). Works such as this retain the form of the table, with the top raised to give the fullest view. Blackadder later dispensed with this method, using the surface of the canvas itself as the field on which objects appear. Here she is moving towards this, and only a suggestion of the table can be seen, with a definite tonal change on the left and right sides, indicating the edge of a table and a suggestion of a table cloth edge at the bottom of the canvas. In fact the artist seems to have ensured that she has signed the work on the solid table, rather than on the draping fabric below. The objects here include a black coffee pot, which appears in a number of works of this period, a pair of clogs, a painted Easter egg and a coffee grinder. The objects featured in Blackadder‘s still lifes of this time tend to reflect objects collected on travels - ‘an eclectic array of objects [which speak of her] fascination with the exotic‘ (Annabel Macmillan)
- Dimensions: Framed 109 cm (H) x 139 cm (W). Unframed: 88.5 cm H x 120 cm W.
- Digital Copy:A digital copy exists.
- Location: Store
- Related Material: AC/AF/B/7
- Related Material: AC/OF/1973/25
- Accession Number: 1973.25
- Contact: University of Stirling Art Collection
