Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/715572
6 of intense blue and ointment pink, and its baroque lump of amber-like resin, appears improvisatory, bordering on insouciant. Then one begins to register the V-shaped anchor points at its edges, and the finely balanced dialogues between shapes, as they each direct movement across the field of broadly applied matt impasto. It is a work poised somehow on the cusp of finish, a provisional statement rich in possibility, and one that marks a potential new direction. In discussing the key influences on his work, Blackburn also cites the American Ray Parker's canvases of the 1960s, to which the artist applied oil paint with rags rather than brushes, delicately dabbing pigment and allowing it to spread naturally in creating his soft-edged cloud and boulder-like forms; forms that can be seen to suggest the expansive landscapes of his childhood in South Dakota. 3 For Blackburn: 'Parker is such a beautiful abstract painter. There is a great purity about his work. If there's anything I got from him it was this purity of form.' He goes on to stress the importance of form in his own work, his aim towards a: 'dynamic sense of purity. You've got to work for it: there are lots of distractions along the way. It takes a great discipline to pare things down, and to leave things out.' Within this show, one of the closest works to the condensed purity of form Blackburn describes is Orange Glow (2007), with its sculptural squashed circle held gently in check by the intensely stippled form coming in at the right. Amongst the artist's larger paintings, Orange Glow is somewhat unusual in its strength of colour. Though he works from a richly varied palette, much of the work is tonal, and its colour often derives not only from paint but also from the found materials the artist incorporates; stuff left untreated, often bearing the signs of its former life in scuffmarks and blemishes. Such materials are often imbued with a quiet eloquence. Look for instance at two related works here: Assembly of Forms - Yellow and Assembly of Forms - Black, in which pieces of stained cloth and canvas of subtly different Orange Glow, 2007 (re-worked 2015/16) Assembly of Forms - Black, 2007