Oil painting -> List of Painters -> Basil-Blackshaw

Basil-Blackshaw

Early Life: Basil Blackshaw Basil Blackshaw brought up in Boardmills, County Down, Blackshaw attended Methodist College Belfast and studied at Belfast College of Art (1948-1951). In 1951 Blackshaw was awarded a scholarship by the Committee for the encouragement of Music and the Arts, to study in Paris. He was initially acclaimed for his mastery of traditional approaches to painting. He continued to build up as an artist becoming most extremely regarded for his very loose gestural application of paint and a very distinctive and subtle use of colour. His paintings of such sports as horse racing and boxing have made him particularly popular but Blackshaw is also a talented portrait painter.

Career:

Blackshaw's painting are often symbolic in form, but with a non-naturalistic palate which rebalances the composition in an expressionist, even abstract way. His themes are very Irish and often rural greyhounds, Irish Travellers and the landscape. He has also produced portraits and has designed posters for Derry's Field Day Theatre Company.

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland arranged a major retrospective of his work in 1995, which travelled from Belfast to Dublin, Cork and many galleries in the U.S. In 2001 he received the Glen Dimplex award for a Sustained Contriubtion to the Visual Arts in Ireland is the eminent Irish painter Basil Blackshaw. The Ulster Museum held a major exhibition of his work in 2002.