Vivien Blackett

Vivien Blackett was an artist in residence at the National Gallery, London, during the time of this solo exhibition. The residency continues today, and is organised every year so that an artist can receive the benefits of a studio at the heart of one of the world’s great collections and so that visitors can talk to a living artist within the context of history that only the gallery can provide.

Blackett uses strong, bold colours and her subjects are the landscape and still life. These two subjects are often combined, sometimes causing clashes in size between objects, or object and background. She is concerned to create certain moods and does this by emphasizing different aspects of her formal repertoire of objects. The artist said of her work for this exhibition:

“My language of ‘characters’ is quite interchangeable. For example, a triangle, loop or crescent can be very dynamic in the painting but still or statuesque in another, and the roles often change several times while working in a painting”.

The exhibition was opened by Alistair Smith – Keeper, Education and Exhibitions, National Gallery.

During the exhibition, the artist worked with schools in Portsmouth, in which selected resulting work was shown at the gallery alongside the show.

About the artist:

Vivien Blackett (1956) is a London-based painter who studied fine art at Goldsmiths’ College. She was artist-in-residence at the National Gallery, 1986–7, and Camden Arts Centre, 1992. In that year she was included in the Women’s Art exhibition at New Hall, Cambridge. In 2007 Blackett created a body of work for a solo exhibition at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Blackett wrote that her work was “concerned with generating new meaning through the juxtaposition of different images, both borrowed and invented. I am interested in our quest for knowledge of the world we inhabit. I borrow images from books on subjects as diverse as chemistry, cooking and witchcraft, which I adapt as I work, often combining them with images of my own invention” She has an “interest in illusion and in the difference between the surface appearance of things, what does or might lie beneath”.