David Blackwood in his studio, circa 1983.John de Visser/Courtesy of The Rooms
Combining etching, aquatint and sometimes drypoint, David Blackwood’s prints of Newfoundland life in the early 20th century are memories pulled from dreams of a half-forgotten place. A place where sailing ships are dwarfed by towering walls of ice burst into flame, where shadowy figures stumbled through icy mist and veiled mummers gathered round the body of a friend. Annie Proulx called it Atlantis, a lost world under the waves.
It’s hard to talk about these romantic images without, like Proulx, putting the emphasis on the mythic. Blackwood, who died on July 2 in Port Hope, Ont. at the age of 80, was often turned into a kind of legend as well.
An artistic prodigy who grew up in the remote outpost of Wesleyville, Newfoundland, he sold his first piece to the National Gallery at 23 after moving to Toronto to study on scholarship at the Ontario College of Art. The 1976 National Film Board documentary Blackwood opens by comparing him to Rembrandt. But the brown-haired man the camera follows as he pulls ink across a copper plate doesn’t seem mythic at all. He is as ordinary as the people he etched into the metal.
Blackwood’s work, drawn from the stories he heard growing up in Newfoundland and his childhood memories, was as much concerned with the everyday as it was with the fantastic.
David Blackwood. Brian and Martin Winsor, 1979. Etching , aquatint and drypoint on wove paper, Overall: 61.7 x 92.2 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift of David and Anita Blackwood, 2008.© Estate of David Blackwood 2008/275 / Courtesy of Art Gallery of Ontario
It was just that, in an outport town, the ordinary included whales and icebergs and death in the snow. “It can be viewed as romantic, it can be viewed as nostalgic,” says Mireille Eagan, the contemporary art curator at the Rooms in St. John’s. “But for many that grew up here, it rings true.”
It was, according to Blackwood’s long-time gallerist and close friend Emma Butler, a truth that made his work hard to look at for older generations of Newfoundlanders. “A lot of people were reluctant to hang Blackwood’s images in their homes, because it reminded them of the hard, hard times, and the disasters and the loss of people on the ice or on the ocean.” The tragedy felt too close.
The experiences Blackwood’s images depict are the kinds of memories that return to you when you’re sleeping or that you hold back, afterwards, afraid that if you tell people, you won’t be believed. In Blackwood’s Brian and Martin Winsor (1979) an empty dory sits lodged in the ice. Where are Brian and Martin? They are there only in their absence. In The Great Peace of Brian and Martin Winsor (1982) we see them at last, sleeping beside their guns on the bottom of the ocean below the tail of a great whale.
David Blackwood. The Great Peace of Brian and Martin Winsor, 1982. Etching, aquatint and drypoint on wove paper, Overall: 87.6 x 62 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift of David and Anita Blackwood, Port Hope, Ontario, 1999.© Estate of David Blackwood 99/959 / Courtesy of Art Gallery of Ontario
If we have become used to seeing the objects in Blackwood’s work as a shorthand for a picturesque version of Newfoundland it’s because that is what they’ve become – the icebergs and dories and rocky coasts in tourism commercials for the island, supersaturated and glorious. The happiest sublime you could imagine. But in his commitment to the past, Blackwood held on to the grief and terror that made those symbols more complicated for the people who watched their meaning shift.
This is how, Eagan says, he managed to make art that was so fundamentally about a place. “The experience of being around something like a whale or an iceberg, the feelings of loss that many feel when they look at the changing cultural landscape of Newfoundland and Labrador in terms of resettlement, in terms of the cod moratorium, these deep stories that are embedded in how this province views itself. He captured the complexity of those feelings.” In doing so he turned the survival of ordinary people living ordinary lives into an epic tale. “He made us see ourselves,” Butler says. “His gift to us is the body of work he left behind, the visual history of who we are.”
That gift was a way to grapple with change and find a way forward that kept memory close. Change keeps coming, in Newfoundland and elsewhere. The town of Gaultois, its population aging and dwindling, has just voted for resettlement. The icebergs and whales that Blackwood cast as constants greater than any human endeavour have turned out to be so fragile, so vulnerable to the human world. It comes hurtling toward us, and it can leave us longing for stories where we know the end.
David Blackwood's Eileen's Arrangement, 2015, [watercolour on paper]. courtesy of Emma Butler GalleryCourtesy of Emma Butler Gallery
That feeling, Blackwood knew, could be as overwhelming as an iceberg when you’re far out at sea. In the summer he painted watercolours of flowers, bouquets from the garden of his wife, Anita, which were full of life and firmly in the present, the icebergs just small shapes on the horizon. He was, Butler says simply, “a really kind man, so supportive of the younger artists, and he loved teaching, of course, and he was always helpful to other young people to come along.”
“We’re collectively mourning here,” Eagan told me. “And it’s a beautiful thing to witness that.”
