Keep Things Moving

Movement is one of the central elements in the work and oeuvre of Charles Blockey. Born in 1960 in the small Scottish town of Dunfermline on the Firth of Forth, he was drawn to Edinburgh and Leeds at an early age, where he studied at the art colleges there. This was followed by study trips to Italy, France, Spain, Austria and Switzerland, where he received further important inspiration and finally settled as a freelance artist and teacher. In addition, numerous sketchbooks created during trips to Sardinia or Indonesia testify to his engagement with new countries and foreign cultures.

The titles of his works also often speak of change of location: Rising, Earth meets Sea, Footsteps, Voyage, Diver, Flight Over, Fly Away Home, Wanderer, Late Passage evoke movement in space – be it the landscape explored on foot, which from an early stage was one of the most important motifs in Blocke s work, or the movement of continents by aeroplane, or the elemental clash of land and sea; the latter represents both different states of matter, such as solid and liquid, and contrasting forms of existence, such as settled and nomadic.

Movement as a pictorial principle

But the significance of movement goes beyond these purely biographical facts and literary allusions. In the creative process itself, movement can be felt. Blockey originally comes from figurative representation, and the genres of figurative painting: portrait, landscape, still life are still directly visible in the paintings and prints of recent years: for example, he inserts human figures into compositions made up of a few large colour fields that actually seem abstract, he inserts human figures and thus reinterprets the pictorial space to represent a landscape or interior; other colour field compositions are given a scenic appearance by a network of lines or seem to focus on the narrowly measured space and the few objects of a still life.

Freedom of colour

But in the most recent pictures, as the artist himself says, a new simplicity is apparent: the compositions consist of a few, mostly round colour fields, applied flat next to or on top of each other, rarely or never bordered by lines or designed in themselves. The artistic achievement now concentrates on the design of light and dark contrasts and the balance of colour chords, which - as a result of his decades of experience - now fully satisfies the artist and increasingly seems to be the actual goal of painting. Even earlier, colour impressed him most when it was still unbound and free on the palette before the actual painting process. On the basis of this insight, the key question for him today is: how can one consciously deal with free colour? The late paintings of the American Mark Rothko (1903-1970) appear to Blockey as an extreme formulation of this freedom of colour, which in its consistency can hardly be surpassed.

Blockey, however, has developed strategies with which he can implement his demand for freedom of colour in his very own way. The first consists of working with glass. In the transparent material of his reliefs, which are usually freestanding, the colour material seems to unfold freely and float. The other strategy consists of painting on large sheets of thin paper, which absorbs the colour quite differently than an unprimed or unprimed canvas. While working with glass is elaborate and time-consuming, the process of creation on paper is naturally faster and more relaxed. These sheets are then mounted on a framed canvas in a second step, giving the paint a fixed location. For the artist, however, this is actually only a practical solution, due to the durability of his works. On the other hand, his demand for freedom of colour is ultimately met by hanging the sheets on linen in the room or on the wall with metal pins. This means that the colour remains potentially mobile and can change its location again and again. In this way, Blockey succeeds in realising one of his central artistic concerns: to preserve the freedom of colour.

©️2024 Heinz Stahlhut