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3 Fundamental to an appreciation of John Blackburn's painting is an understanding of his philosophical approach, one that deeply informs his modus operandi whilst also setting him at something of a remove from most of his contemporaries, certainly from those engaged in abstract painting. 1 For as he has made clear, central to his work is its concern with the human condition: 'you cannot really escape from certain facts, and it's not always man's inhumanity to man that is the terrible thing: sometimes life itself, just the mere fact of being alive, you are faced with a natural brutality. For me, painting has got to have a connection with the physical. My inspiration comes from the brutality of being alive. I can't escape that.' The development of Blackburn's catholic, empirical use of materials – in the early years used partly though not wholly out of financial necessity – stems from this deep desire for connectivity. The highly distinctive surfaces of his paintings are essentially metaphoric: equivalent to both the physical and spiritual body, poetic equivalents for feeling. Our responses to them stem not only from their delectability of form and texture, but also from what they stimulate in us on an altogether more primal and intuitive level. It perhaps comes as no surprise to find that the British painter to whom Blackburn feels closest is Francis Bacon. More broadly his influences tend to be in the work of European artists, particularly those operating during the Second World War and its aftermath. Of these, Fautrier and Tàpies are especially important. He has also been compelled by German artists of the post-war period, those who in their work attempted to confront and exorcise an overwhelming recent past: artists such as Joseph Beuys, Otto Muehl, and Gustav Metzger, the Jewish artist who came to England in 1938 as a twelve-year-old refugee from his native Nuremberg, and in the late 1950s achieved notoriety as the inventor of a highly politicised auto- destructive art. Also pertinent in this context is Gerhard Richter's commentary on the ways in which profound feeling and suffering are made manifest in art, one that reads as markedly significant to Blackburn's work: 'Art has always been basically about agony, desperation and helplessness… We often neglect this side of things by concentrating on the formal, aesthetic side in isolation. We no longer see content in form…the fact is that content does not have a form (like a dress that you can change): it is form (which cannot be changed). Agony, desperation, and helplessness cannot be represented except aesthetically, because their source is the wounding of beauty (Perfection).' 2 Following his art college training and National Service, Blackburn worked initially in graphic and textile design. It was however only in 1959 whilst living in New Zealand that he first came to the realisation that he was in fact a painter. The catalyst was a burgeoning existential questioning, of a nature not uncommon amongst his generation, to which he felt compelled to give form: abstract ideas demanding their expression in an abstract language. He produced a series of paintings generically entitled Encaustics, made outdoors on unstretched sheets spread out onto hardboard laid on M A T E R I A L N A T U R E B Y I A N M A S S E Y Ian Massey & John Blackburn, April 2016