"that world of experience, of feeling, which exists in all of us"

"Of all Charles Blackman’s myriad achievements, none have captured the public imagination more powerfully than his images inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Simultaneously amusing and quietly disturbing, these boldly coloured, lyrical depictions of Carroll’s absurd tale not only encapsulate the duality that is a hallmark of Blackman’s oeuvre – innocence and experience, fantasy and fact, dream and nightmare. More poignantly perhaps, the series also reveals the existential, often strongly autobiographical nature of Blackman’s art, offering valuable insight both into his own inner world, and the human condition more universally. As Thomas Shapcott suggests, Alice was the subject that ‘[released] in Blackman the artist the imaginative capacity to explore freely, without the worry of strict realism or logic, that world of experience, of feeling, which exists in all of us’."

Important Australian + International Fine Art Sydney 28 August 2019
source

 CHARLES BLACKMAN (1928 – 2018) ALICE TALL, 1956

thanks to Mark Richards.