Collector’s eye

To celebrate Elizabeth Blackadder’s 80th birthday, the Scottish National Gallery is staging a landmark retrospective (until 2 January 2012) spanning the last six decades of the artist’s career.

Blackadder is best known for her vibrant still-lives of the Sixties, a time when most of her contemporaries were experimenting with Pop and Abstract Expressionism. Influenced by her passion for collecting and for fastidious attention to detail, she has spent a lifetime popularising and successfully re-inventing the genre.

Blackadder’s prolific body of work reveals that she treats all her subjects — from a vase to a cat or flower — with the same rigorous study (‘Still-life with Iris’, 2000, above). She often scratches into thick oil with the end of her brush to give more detail and, by leaving a negative, white space around them as if they were a painting within another, she highlights some of the most seemingly banal objects.