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9 immediately obvious in works that are more intimate in scale – those such as Blue Rain, Yellow Form Entering and Slash – it is also found in the placement of minor components within the larger works. It is evident here both in the triptych and in an associated work, one that again incorporates blister-packs, Untitled (Kimono). Here a floating form is anchored and weighted by small dark painted and collaged elements, and by carefully positioned strips of canvas across its bottom edge. Set within its surface are bits of plastic, snippets of photographs and a little badge with the word 'committee' printed onto it; like cryptic clues to subtext or narrative, though in fact drafted in more prosaically for shape and tonal texture as much as anything, in a magpie instinct in which everything is up for grabs. Though the darker side of human nature has often informed Blackburn's work, he is a deeply humanistic painter whose work is essentially affirmative. The themes in his work have remained consistent down the years, the ways in which he revisits them continually open to experiment and reassessment, to new inventions of form and material as he strives for what he describes as an elusive truth. • Quotes by John Blackburn are from conversations with the author. 1 Amongst close contemporaries of Blackburn (b.1932) are Gillian Ayres, Basil Beattie, Howard Hodgkin and John Hoyland. The British artist whose early works are closest to those by Blackburn is Stuart Brisley (b.1933). See for instance his Untitled abstract painting dated 1960 (masonite board, canvas, jute sacking, tar, PVA, natural earth pigments and oil paint) in the Tate collection. 2 Gerhard Richter (b.1932, Dresden) is quoted in Robert Storr's essay Burnt Holes, Bloody Holes, Black Holes: Art After Catastrophe, in 'Destroy the Picture: painting the void, 1949-1962' ed. Paul Schimmel, Skira Rizzoli Publications Inc, New York in association with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012, p244. 3 Work by Ray Parker (1922-1990) has most recently been exhibited at the Washburn Gallery, New York: Ray Parker: Paintings from the 1960s, April-June 2016. 4 The blister-packs are collected from various friends and family members who are on medication. They amount to what the artist describes as 'the evidence of an all too familiar 21 st century phenomenon'. 5 Asked how he came to be inspired to work in diptych and triptych formats, Blackburn cites seeing Cy Twombly's Three Studies for the Temeraire (a re-interpretation of Turner's The Fighting Temeraire), in the group show Encounters: New Art from Old, National Gallery, London, 2000. He also mentions Karl Weschke's triptych Study for the Women of Berlin (1969-70). Both works he describes as outstanding. Blackburn also mentions in this context being much impressed by Colin McCahon's diptych and triptych format paintings, which he saw when living in New Zealand. Untitled (Kimono), 2014