Still Life with Japanese Water Flower
- Artist:
- Type: Painting
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Production Date: 1973 - 1974
- 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. '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).
Blackadder wrote ‘My first visit to Japan was not made until 1985 but long before that I was influenced by Japanese art, seen in books and reproductions‘and especially by the ‘Great Japan‘ exhibition in the Royal Academy of Arts 1981-2‘.
In Japan she favoured the Zen gardens of Kyoto and in many ways, her work depicts the principles of Zen which give paramount importance to the idea of empty space. Souvenirs of her travels would appear in many of her paintings. - Dimensions: Framed: 101.5 cm (H) x 126.6 cm (W). Unframed: 83.5 cm (H) x 108 cm (W).
- Acquisition Note: Gifted by the artist in honour of Colin Bell - Principal
- Digital Copy:A digital copy exists.
- Location: Iris Murdoch Building
- Related Material: AC/AF/B/7
- Accession Number: 2004.11
- Contact: University of Stirling Art Collection
