Tracking a lifetime of quiet brilliance

Scottish National Gallery, EDINBURGH

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Elizabeth Blackadder has achieved something that very few contemporary artists can claim. She is genuinely and widely popular, but she has never for a moment compromised her integrity as an artist. The major retrospective that has just opened in the Scottish National Gallery shows this very clearly. Her work is beautiful, but you take it as it is. It never seeks to ingratiate itself.

These qualities reflect her dedication. Last week, after the long, crowded evening of the opening, it was late and she must have been very tired. Nevertheless as I took my leave, her parting words were, “I am looking forward to getting back to the studio in the morning.” A student at Edinburgh College of Art, and concurrently at Edinburgh University, 60 years ago, she learnt her dedication from artist-teachers like William Gillies, Penelope Beaton and Robert Henderson-Blyth. They lived for their art in a way that was practically monastic and is almost unimaginable for an artist now.

After completing a postgraduate year at the art college, Blackadder spent the winter of 1955-6 in Italy. The first major group of works here date from that visit. Italy was still the destination of choice for art students, above all for the chaste beauty of the art of the Trecento and Quattrocento and the buildings and townscapes preserved from that time. There are magnificent drawings here of the stacked-up roofs of the town of Siena, for instance, of its cathedral and of the cathedrals of Florence and Pisa. There are bare winter landscapes too, however, that reflect the austerity of her life in the Italian winter. Italy can be dreadfully cold in winter and at that time Italian houses often were too. Her dedication was tested, but she came through triumphantly. Back in Edinburgh the following year she and John Houston were married, starting a unique artistic partnership that lasted until John’s death in 2008. The two artists complemented, influenced and supported each other, but remained quite distinct. The habit of travelling to paint is one that Blackadder has retained all her life. First she and Houston travelled around Scotland, then they went to France. Church in Brittany of 1963 is a lovely painting in cool greys and greens recording such a journey in search of inspiration. Latterly they visited Italy almost every year and they also went several times to Japan.

She is a superb printmaker and this began early, too. Fifeshire Farm, for instance, is a very striking lithograph from 1960. Limited in colour to black, yellow and grey, the drawing is free and somehow provisional, yet everything seems to be in its proper place. This sense of rightness is a defining feature of her work. You see it in still lifes from the 1960s: Still Life with Turkish Coffee Mill, for instance. Various objects, including the coffee mill and a blue Venetian glass, are placed against a dark blue ground that might or might not be a table top – but not just empty interval, the space between them too is alive and present to us. Thus the picture is not just a vehicle, a window onto something else, but has its own unambiguous presence. The objects within it have their own identity, but are translated into a new, strongly present pictorial reality. This intuitive sense of interval gave her a natural affinity with Japanese art and a room devoted to pictures inspired by Japan shows how fruitful this relationship has been for her. But here, as in all her work, while you can see an influence, elsewhere of School of Paris painting, for instance, of Hockney, or Abstract Expressionism, she remains firmly herself.

The 60s were colourful everywhere and this colourfulness enters her work, too. In View to a Garden, Venice, she pays homage to Matisse with a view through a window onto a deep blue sky and brilliant green foliage. In Portuguese Still Life of 1966 the colour becomes positively jazzy. An orange field is surrounded by zig-zags in red, green and purple. In Flowers and a Red Table, also from the late 60s, the red table occupies the whole field of the picture. The colour key is high, but a little still-life of purple and pink flowers in a blue jug holds its own against it. Thereafter, replacing a cool, more limited palette, bold colour and new and original harmonies become a frequent and often striking feature of her work.

You see it in Still-life with Mughal drawing, for instance, or in Exotic Fruit, and in more recent work, too, such as Melon, Aubergine and Chinese Cloth from 2004, or in an exquisite painting from 2006 of the same blue jug, 40 years on, with a single pink poppy in it.

In Self-portrait with Red Lacquer Table, the red table occupies the whole foreground. She is seated against the wall behind it. The black and white of her Japanese robe is clearly defined, but she herself is not. A quiet person by nature, she doesn’t step in front of her pictures as someone of her undoubted celebrity might do. She leaves them to speak for themselves. In Self-portrait with Cat it is the same. She is just a bust-length figure in profile. The cat pays attention to us. She does not.

Cats like this one are almost the only animated creatures that appear to ruffle the calm in her paintings. Their only rivals are goldfish. In Dark Pond Alhambra, a superb painting looking down on to a pool full of fish, it is like a metamorphosis and the brush strokes themselves have come alive as fish.

Her cats are popular, and are represented here by several paintings and a number of lovely drawings, but it is characteristic of her art that they have a life of their own. You see that clearly in Still Life with Cats. I once wrote about it when it had two cats in it, but when I came to illustrate it in a different context some years later I found a third cat had wandered in and settled down comfortably in the composition. The cats have their own life. There’s nothing anthropomorphic about them to bring spurious charm.

The same is true of all the things she paints, but especially of her watercolours of flowers. She is a superb botanical artist and also a great gardener. As she paints the flowers and plants that she loves, she brings the same respect to them. She gives them their full autonomy even as she gives them an alternative life in her painted world.

This exhibition marks Elizabeth Blackadder’s 80th birthday. It is wonderful to see a Scottish artist properly honoured in her own country, but at the same time I am moved to reflect in the year of the Venice Biennale why could she not have represented Scotland there?

The way things are, it is, of course, unthinkable. In the eyes of those who decide these things she seems old-fashioned. The spurious argument is that you can only be truly modern if your art looks new. But great art is not a nine-day wonder. It grows slowly like a tree and as Elizabeth Blackadder’s art so amply demonstrates, it grows most strongly when it is most firmly rooted.

l Until 2 January 2012