Gymkhana Visitors 1961

Charles Blackman made this painting, Gymkhana Visitors, and the colours and the shapes they make create a dark kind of psychological space. You can almost smell the oil paint. The colours are put down pretty directly; there’s not a lot of blending, and in the area of the left-hand figure we see these dashes of blue and white, that suggest sleeves, or hands clasped together. The colours are very sombre, but there are touches of almost clownish bright colours: red, white and blue. The marks are really economical, and this kind of minimal approach is interesting because it’s not really abstract but it’s not exactly figurative either. This painting reminds me a little of Max Beckmann’s paintings of figures in claustrophobic spaces. Beckmann embraced the ambiguity of experience, and Blackman does too. They both point to art as an ongoing conversation and exchange of ideas across time.