Texas Trends in Art Education, Volume 3, Number 1, Fall 1985 Page: 29
This periodical is part of the collection entitled: Texas Trends in Art Education and was provided to The Portal to Texas History by the Texas Art Education Association.
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feel right to use, and one of the criteria
is that they be kind of "used-up"-
so familiar that they are ready to be
"re-seen." They are at an interesting
point-. You can re-use them, make
use of them, put new life into them.
More recently, Blackburn has reintroduced
color into his palette, but the newer works
are also freer, less formal. For the earlier
paintings, he projected the images onto the
canvas with a projector; now he prefers to
freehand the drawings. Earlier the brush-
work was restricted to vertical and horizon-
tal strokes to attain a mechanical cross-hatch
quality. Now the directions of the strokes are
much freer, much more expressive.
Blackburn still applies his color in an
intricate layering of yellow, red, blue
and black; the result continues to sug-
gest the primary-color superpositions
of color printing, but the rendering is
not accurate. Instead, with an astute
sense of structure, Blackburn portrays
Marilyn Monroe with one eye black and
the other red, and he models portions
of the image in staccato passages of
highlighting and shadow .... his tech-
nique has become more interpretive-
somewhat Fauve, where formerly it
was almost Pointillist in its systematic
application of color (Freudenheim, S.,
1985, p. 143).
MARVIN: Your recent paintings don't have
that kind of cross-hatch brush work
quite so much, do they? Like the one of
Marilyn?
ED: Yeah, I consciously moved away from
that.
MARVIN: It really has a more painterly
quality. Does that harken back to your
German Expressionist period-say, be-
fore 1970?
ED: It does, but I don't think that was the
motive. I think the motive was that I
was always trying to do an equation
with a balance between the painting's
reference to media and photography and
its existence as a painting. That has al-
ways been a criterion with me that
whenever the things worked right-it is
finished. It is finished when it has a
proper sort of balance, almost a du-
ality-when it is a painting but has this
other presence at the same time.
MARVIN: Other presence?
ED: Yes, the media photo-or whatever the
source is. I think that loosening up
again to where the strokes do not cor-
respond to the horizontal and vertical
was really just the desire for it to be-
come more of a painting. That's about
the simplest way to say it. In that bal-
ance between those two things, I just
wanted it to be more of a painting again.
The interview came to an end but was fol-
lowed by a brief excursion to Ed's studio, a
roomy, old store in a residential area less
than a mile from his home, and a few mo-ments there were convincing proof that the
search never ends. Ed Blackburn is in the
midst of yet another transition. For years he
has worked in acrylics; in his studio were a
number of paintings in oils. The treatment of
the images is quite different from what we
have associated with Ed Blackburn in the
past, but the images are still media images.
As my parting question, I asked:
MARVIN: Ed, what would be your advice to
some young art student who is about to
start out to establish a reputation and
that sort of thing?
ED: The most important thing to keep in
mind is just to do the best art you can.
That's a lot-just to try to understand
what art is about, look at a lot of it in
reproduction, in museums, and in gal-
leries. Once you are out of school, do-
ing it and looking at it-. Those are the
ways you learn. I think that putting em-
phasis on that-and taking advantage of
any logical opportunities that become
available to you, steps that make sense
to you at the time-. That's a pretty
general answer, but that's always the
way I did it. But first make the art
strong.
ED: Let me add this. It was nice to see
those issues of your magazine. It's a
really valuable thing-and then to find
out that all of you are doing this just
because you want to do it-that no one
is getting paid for it. Art education is
very important in the schools, not be-cause the students are going to be art-
ists, but because it provides another
dimension-things you don't learn in
other classes. It allows students to ex-
perience and think about things in their
own way and through their own individ-
ual sensibilities. This is not always the
case in other subjects.
REFERENCES
Freudenheim, S. (1985). Ed Blackburn at Moody.
Art in America, 73 (1), 143.
Freudenheim, S. (1984). Ed Blackburn's moving
pictures. Texas Homes, 8 (4), 22-28.
Gleason, R. (1983). Introduction. Fact & fiction:
New works by James Surls, Roy Fridge, Ed
Blackburn, Vernon Fisher. Aspen, Colorado:
Aspen Center for the Visual Arts.
Moon, M. & Kincaid, C. (1979, April). Comics as
catalyst for art: Two surveys. Paper pre-
sented at 19th Annual Conference of the
National Art Education Association, San
Francisco, California.
Stone, K. & Thistlethwaite, M. (1982). Ed Black-
burn: Image into painting. Ed Blackburn.
Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian Univer-
sity and the Fort Worth Art Museum, 3-6.
Marvin L. Moon is an Associate Professor in
the Art Department at Texas Tech Univer-
sity, Lubbock, Texas.
Gregory E. Moon is aL L tuue.t at Texas
Tech University, Lubbock, Texas.i3
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9,JStill Life with Comics
1981
Graphite on paper
30" x 20"
Collection: Atlantic Richfield Company, Dallas
Photo courtesy of Moody Gallery, HoustonTRENDS / fall 1985
- A
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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/m1/31/?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.