CHARLES BLACKMAN

From the Garden of Eden to Paradise, gardens have long exercised a fascination, often welcomed oases in the journey of life. They have been places of dalliance and love, refuges in time of plague, of Venus and of Christian virtue, pictorialised in sparkling mosaics, illuminated in medieval manuscripts, and set in Renaissance splendour. The cat likewise has a history just as ancient and as varied – from the domestic to the dangerous, ready to purr or to pounce, a playful pet and a witch's familiar.

The hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden beloved in the later Middle Ages, offered walled protection for the Madonna and Child, and the Cluny tapestries of the Virgin and her unicorn a glimpse of the rarest beauty. Charles Blackman's Dream in a Cat's Garden, mural-like in its dimensions, is likewise protectively encompassing in the breadth of its enclosing flowers, which become bigger as they grow upwards. Its rich colours and beguiling beauty express fruitfulness of mind and body, offering a place of sanctuary and peace, of recollections of childhood figured in the dreaming figure, the white cat happily ensconced to the right. The garden makes its debut in Blackman's art in his famed Alice in Wonderland series of paintings of the late 1950s. This extended into the cat in the garden series, another of his very popular subjects, appearing in paintings, prints and tapestry. At times the 'Alice' and 'garden' themes interchanged, as in Alice's Journey, 1957 and Cat's Garden, 1978.

The cat in the garden theme had its genesis in 1968 when Blackman was inspired by the view from his studio window, looking down into a neighbouring garden enjoyed by the family cat. In 1969 he completed three large paintings of the garden – of the afternoon, evening and at night – attended variously by a Russian Blue or a white cat. Of these, White Cat's Garden in the Afternoon was included in Blackman's retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1993. A later painting, The Hour of a Thousand Flowers, closely related to Dream in a Cat's Garden, was shown in his solo show in Tokyo in 1973, much to the delight of the Japanese, who acquired it for The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.

Much of the appeal of Blackman's paintings comes from his ability to conjure up enchanted images of childhood, dream-like moments of lyrical beauty. Nadine Amadio, in her special monograph on Blackman, wrote evocatively of the garden as  'the domain he lost some time in his childhood and has been painting his way back to ever since. The garden images stem from many sources, real, remembered and imagined. They are not just gardens. They are flowers encircling a feeling or a secret atmosphere. In these quiet dramas with their luminosities of colour and their tender rhythms, his gardens have the medieval power of illuminated stained-glass windows with sunlight or even moonlight behind. The Blackman garden is very often frequented by a white cat, which is a symbol of many things: innocence, childhood, a familiar, a night-self visiting secret places – the enchanted gardens of memory'. ¹ The magic of Dream in a Cat's Garden is derived from its combination of wondrous colours of bright reds and yellows shining among midnight blues and its artifice of weightlessness, of flowers floating dreamlike above the sleeping figure. Blackman realised his dream in paint.

1. Amadio, N., Charles Blackman: The Lost Domains, A. H. & A. W. Reed, Sydney, 1980, p. 80.