Texas Trends in Art Education, Volume 3, Number 1, Fall 1985 Page: 25
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ED: I guess that I always felt that if you just
do the best art you can, that sort of
thing would take care of itself. Back in
about '72, a lady came here to interview
me for a national magazine, and she
noted an idea that was being put forth
by a lot of people: If you're not doing
something from Texas, why are you
here? I just couldn't relate to that. What
really mattered to me was that I was
just trying to do art-good art. It didn't
matter to me. I figured that that con-
cern would just take care of itself. Look
at our state, for example-. There
seems to be a difference in the art of
Houston and Dallas and between Forth
Worth and Houston-and I think there
is a difference-but I think all that sort
of thing kind of takes care of itself.
There are things that you feel in the art
down in Houston that aren't in the art
here. There's a certain amount of sur-
realism that probably comes in from
Louisiana and comes perhaps from it
being a port city-. I don't know. There
are differences, but no one plans it. It
just happens. I think those things just
take care of themselves.Gainesborough's Blue Boy Print
1983
Lithograph
33" x 22"
Collection: the artist
Photo courtesy of Moody Gallery, HoustonBlackburn's interest in media images devel-
oped early. Gleason (1983) reports that
when Ed was a child, he drew his own comic-
adventure strips-media images of a sort. (I
personally found this to be very intriguing as
Kincaid and I (1979) did a study some years
ago that indicated that about forty percent of
the memberships of both the Texas Art Edu-
cation Association and the Texas Association
of Schools of Art felt that comics had played
a major role in promoting their initial inter-
ests in art as a young child.)
In the catalog for one of Ed's solo ex-
hibitions, Stone and Thistlethwaite (1982)
delineate perhaps three major periods that
may be discerned in his work. In actuality, of
course, one finds much overlapping-and
the inevitable cul-de-sacs that are the re-
sult of a continual search for new ideas, new
images, but the first period would be be-
fore 1970:
Before his "discovery" of the media im-
age, Blackburn worked in a noticeably
different style, strongly influenced by
German Expressionism. During the
1960's-a decade marked in large part
by hard edges and clean forms (e.g.,
Noland, Stella, Lichtenstein, Judd)-
Blackburn painted willfully distorted im-
ages which were highly charged in their
rendering and garish in their coloring
(Stone, K. & Thistlethwaite, M., 1982,
p. 3).
MARVIN: From what I have read about you,
Ed, I gather that there have been three
major periods in your work. The first
would have been before 1970-before
you began using the color stitching
technique derived from four-color pro-
cess printing. No, 1970 was the time
when you began painting large works
taken from rather small collages made
from pieces torn from magazines and
newspapers--.
ED: Well, that color-process thing came in at
about that same time-. Really, that's
pretty accurate regarding the time. Be-
fore that-going back to about '59
when I first started painting down at
Austin-. There was kind of a "U.T.
School" there at that time, you might
say, with a kind of impressionistic look,
and I suppose that I was influenced by
that for a few years. Then I went to
New York for a year-I had a schol-
arship at The Brooklyn Museum of
Art-and I became very interested in
the German Expressionists. So, from
about '63 until about '70, I think my
work was pretty influenced by them. It
was real painterly and with very bright,
vivid colors, and I was thinking a lot
about that sort of space that came out
of the German Expressionist Move-
ment-a certain type of flatness, a kind
of intensity to everything being up on
the same plane-. So, to answer your
question, before 1970 my work had kindof a German Expressionist look. Then,
around 1969 or '70, everything was
kind of up in the air with me-. For two
or three years in there, I was trying a
lot of different stuff. It came into that
kind of "photo-derived" work, I guess
you could call it, that took the form of a
kind of collage-.
One common thread that runs through all of
Blackburn's work is his concern for the in-
tegrity of the picture plane. This concern
has its roots, no doubt, in his early fascina-
tion with German Expressionism and its
concepts of space.
One major tenet of modern art to which
Blackburn is aligned is the assertation
of the integrity of the picture plane-
the acknowledgement that before
anything else, a painting is a flat sur- /25
face. . . . Blackburn renders the form
in a believable manner without being
deceptively real... Herein lies the
play between what Blackburn calls the
"narrative" (representation) and the
"non-narrative" (purely visual experi-
ence-an idea which has fascinated
him consistently (Stone, K. & Thistle-
thwaite, M., 1982, p. 3).
About 1970, however, Ed's search for
new directions did carry him into the second
major period of his development. At this
point he overcame two strong aversions:
(1) painting too realistically and (2) working
from slides and photos. In regard to the
latter, he created small collages from pieces
torn from magazines and newspapers, photo-
graphed them, and painted from the pro-
jected slides and the actual collages.
MARVIN: You tend to work quite large too,
don't you?
ED: Yes, my paintings tend to have their full
potential when they are large. It's that
thing of scale.
GREG: A bigger-than-life sort of thing?
MARVIN: Pulls it out of context?
ED: I think that those things enter into it,
but the issues in the painting are just a
little clearer when the painting gets up
in scale.
MARVIN: Kind of like in the one you did of
Orson Wells-the one in which you
painted the thumb tacks up in the cor-
ners? I mean, if it had been a small
painting of the little collage from which
it was derived, it really would have been
trompe l'oeil, but, being it is as large as
it is, there is no way anyone would mis-
take those for real thumb tacks. In the
painting, they actually would be about
the size of small dinner plates-.
ED: Yes, That was funny. Those thumb
tacks were kind of a breakthrough for
me about painting realistically. I just
couldn't bring myself to paint too them
realistically. I was afraid that would
make it a bad painting-that it would beTRENDS / fall 1985
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Texas Art Education Association. Texas Trends in Art Education, Volume 3, Number 1, Fall 1985, periodical, Autumn 1985; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth279681/m1/27/?q=architectural+drawings: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Art Education Association.