1938-2020
Tom Blackwell was a founding artist of the Photorealist movement whose iconic paintings of motorcycles and city storefronts revived the New York art scene’s interest in realism
For more than a half-century, his work helped to define the Photorealist style with his brilliant large-scale paintings of motorcycles, vintage cars and scenes of urban life reflected in store windows.
Self-taught, he began his career as an Abstract Expressionist with solo shows in his early twenties in Los Angeles and other west-coast venues. Inspired by the work of the Pop Artists, particularly James Rosenquist, he soon turned his eye to combining media-derived representational imagery. “Gook” a large, shaped canvas painted in reaction to the horrors of the Vietnam war, was included in the 1969 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition, “Human Concern Personal Torment”.
By the later 1960s he had fully immersed himself in a style that was initially dubbed “New Realism.” His iconic large-scale paintings of highly polished chrome motorcycles and car engines put him at the forefront and propelled his success as a Photorealist, garnering praise from curators and collectors. A work from this early Rod and Cycle seriesOrphan Annie, was included in the 1972 Whitney Annual.
A master colorist, Blackwell’s interest in the reflectivity of artificial surfaces, as well as the interplay between light and shadow, were continual inspirations for his work. Using photographs as his source material, Blackwell’s imagery evolved to eventually include motorcycles in situ, airplanes, and storefront windows. His explorations of the interplay between store-window displays and the urban street-life captured in the reflections became an abiding interest and fascination.
Photography leant itself perfectly to the translation of visual information from eye to hand to canvas, allowing Blackwell to recreate cinematic stills of fleeting moments. Blackwell became a founding member of a group of New York realist painters, who are known as the Photorealists. Painting in the highly detailed style of Photorealism provided him the opportunity to explore “the complex visual experience of the contemporary world, the complexities of the light, the shadings of color, tonality and spatial relationships.”
American curators were quick to embrace Blackwell’s Americana subject matter in this newly emerging Photorealist style. In the 1970s, the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum acquired Blackwell’s work for their permanent collections in rapid succession. In the decades since, Blackwell’s paintings have been acquired by dozens of museums and institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Parrish Art Museum, the Speed Art Museum, amongst others.
Tom Blackwell was born in Chicago on March 9, 1938. Although from a disadvantaged background, for a short time in his early childhood Blackwell was enrolled in the Ffoulkes School, whose teaching models were a precursor to the Montessori approach. It was there that his artistic proclivities were recognized, greatly encouraged and rewarded. A seminal point in Tom’s life was a trip at age 11 to see the Van Gogh exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. Blackwell later stated that he was thrilled by the work and story of the Van Gogh’s life-- “seeing that show…that was when I realized that there was such a thing as being an artist, that it could be a life’s work, and I knew that’s what I was going to be.”
When Tom was in high school, his family moved to the tiny town of Incline outside of Yosemite National Park. It was here that Blackwell first began to sell small watercolors, scenes inspired by the park’s majestic scenery. Ansel Adams ran a gallery/art supply store in the valley at that time and the photographer became an inspiration and supporter of the young artist’s work.
At 17, Tom enlisted in the Navy. He hoped to attend art school on the G.I. bill. However, the benefits of the GI bill were rescinded for veterans who did not serve during war time, so his hopes were never realized. Upon leaving the Navy, he moved to Laguna Beach, where he became an active and noted member of the Laguna art colony. His work showed early promise and was featured in solo shows in several West Coast galleries and museums. He lived for a time in Los Angeles and San Francisco and then later in Woodstock, New York.
In the late 1960s, he moved to New York City, where he met his future wife, author Linda Chase. They married in 1969. Drawn to the newly emerging SoHo arts district, they purchased an abandoned factory space that they converted into a sprawling loft where they lived for several years with Linda’s daughter Leila. Blackwell taught in the Masters Program of the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1985-1989 and was an artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College, Keene State University, New Hampshire and the University of Arizona.
Blackwell’s work was represented in New York City by the O.K. Harris Gallery, The Bernard Dannenberg Gallery, the Sydney Janis Gallery, Allan Stone Gallery and the Louis K Meisel Gallery.
Blackwell pursued Photorealism throughout the entirety of his career. With the advent of the digital camera, Blackwell adopted the latest technology using this new tool to create ever-more vivid, highly detailed paintings. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he also produced an important body of work that he called Montage Paintings which feature combined photo-derived images that explore urban and rural contrasts and issues of artmaking, which were the subject of several solo museum shows.
In recent years, numerous Photorealist exhibitions have celebrated Blackwell’s contributions to the movement and to the art world at large, at venues that have included the Deutsche Guggenheim (2009), the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (2013), the New Orleans Museum of Art (2014-15), the Musée d’Ixelles (2016), and the Parrish Art Museum (2017-2018). And in 2016, The Artist Book Foundation published a volume on the artist, Tom Blackwell:
The Complete Paintings 1970-2014.
Blackwell viewed the Photorealist style as a vehicle that prompted his audience to look beyond the surface of the composition and of reality itself. “I love the way these images caught by the photograph confound your visual expectations,” he has said. “The way the outside world intrudes or gets invited in by the reflections, whether it’s a chrome hubcap, a rearview mirror or a plate glass window.”
As Carter Ratcliff adeptly discusses in his essay about the artist, “[m]any have noted the reflectiveness of the chrome and the sheets of plate glass that appear in so many of Blackwell’s paintings. The reflective surfaces “expand the space depicted to include things actually outside the scene encompassed by the canvas.” Ratcliff comments on the quiet brilliance of Blackwell’s brushwork and goes on to say: “With the unflagging responsiveness of his eye and painterly touch, Blackwell reveals what he calls “the ineffable in the commonplace.”
He is survived by his wife, Linda Chase, his stepdaughter, Leila Knox, his brothers Patrick and James and his sister Janet.
