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Ad Code: 4
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An example of work by Tarleton Blackwell
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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Biography from Charleston Renaissance Gallery:
|  Tarleton Blackwell’s calm and wry manner merely hints at the controlled
chaos of his paintings - animated with lively scenes of pigs, wolves,
foxes, dogs, roosters, and more - layered with portraits, figures, and
familiar icons from both high and popular culture. This
exhibition of 20 oil and mixed-media paintings examines some of the
varied sources of Blackwell’s art, focusing on his intermixing of rural
southern imagery, the Baroque art of the Spanish master Diego
Velazquez, and symbols of American power, justice, and money. The
works range from an early oil painting in the celebrated Hog Series,
Return of Uncle John Edward’s Boar III (1988), to one of his more
recent, Fox Chef with Link Sausage/Coffee (2003), a zany tableau from a
hog sub-series called the Cinderella Section. The selection
features some of the artist’s best-known characters, like the
militaristic Fox General and the U.S. Marshall (an opossum), as well as
the numerous hogs and piglets that have made him one of the most
notable American artists working in the South today.
Born in
1956 and raised in Manning, South Carolina, Tarleton Blackwell received
his bachelor’s degree in art education from Benedict College in
1978. He was included in a contemporary southern exhibition at
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in his senior year, and during
this visit, Blackwell was first inspired by the art of Velazquez,
particularly the portrait of Juan de Paraja (1650). “I was astounded
with his technical achievement in painting, and intrigued by his
underlying theme of dignity,” he indicates. He continued studies at the
University of South Carolina, earning master’s degrees in art and fine
art in 1983 and 1984, respectively, and was quickly recognized for his
talent.
Blackwell began the Hog Series in 1983 while a graduate
art student. He was inspired by memories and visions of growing up in
the rural midlands of South Carolina, where his father, a Baptist
minister, owned a pig farm, and pork production was a major business
that he knew well. The Return of Uncle John Edward’s Boar III reveals
much of his early style and approach to the pig as subject matter.
These works portray animals that he knew - like this cage boar,
portrayed in three views, and juxtaposed to a simple, storybook-like
rendering of an adorable pink pig with her piglets in a fenced yard.
Blackwell emphasizes the contrast between the realistic and fairy tale
pigs through color and form - with the pink pigs flat and outlined,
shown on a page taken from a spiral book. The boars are more
dimensional and real, pressed against the confines of the cage (and the
picture plane), and expressively brushed in tones of gray against blue.
Blackwell also adopts a characteristic formal arrangement derived from
Velazquez, that of creating a “scene within a scene,” which gives his
works their complex narrative content.
The pigs quickly took on
a host of other animals in Blackwell’s art, beginning with the wolf,
the known prey and enemy of the three little pigs. As with many of the
artist’s characters, the wolf assumes widely different guises - cunning
and comical as the bespectacled captain leading the pigs away from
their tidy brick home in El Carabina II (1998): dangerous and powerful
as Link Sausage/Wolf General (1992), a four-star general dangling long
links of sausage in the drapery of an American flag; or faithful and
good, as in recurring portraits of Blackwell’s beloved German Shepherd,
Wolff. The fox is another predatory creature similar to the wolf,
variously invented as a chef, general, and sometimes protector of his
natural adversary, the rooster.
Although Blackwell has developed
other thematic series in the course of his work, the Hog Series is his
chef d’oeuvre - the project with which he began his serious art over
twenty years ago, and which he continues to this day, with much growth
and many subtle evolutions. As he has explained: “The essence of the
hog series can be related to the series of works Velazquez created
depicting the jesters and dwarfs of King Philip IV’s court. Velazquez
portrayed these subjects as equals to their master. I have tried to
portray hogs with dignity and respect, while at the same time revealing
and sharing some of my past personal experiences.”
It was not
only the Spanish artist’s sensitive treatment of royal society’s
buffoons that Blackwell admired and emulated with pigs, but also
Velazquez’s innovative rendering of multiple visions and subjects that
add layers of meaning and ambiguity to painting. The diptych, Las Meninas (1999),
is one of Blackwell’s most ambitious homages to Velazquez, modeled on
his renowned seventeenth century painting titled Las Meninas (The Maids
of Honor, or The Family of Philip IV (c. 1656; Museo del Prado, Madrid).
For
the primary figures in his contemporary version, Blackwell creates a
collage-like portrait of one of his hogs for the Infanta Margarita
(daughter of the royal couple), while pigs serve as her maids and the
court dwarves. Wolff sits in as the royal dog in the lower right.
In place of the figures of Philip IV and his wife, Mariana of Austria,
in the original painting (seen only in a mirror reflection), is a
portrait of the artist’s parents. As in Velazquez’s
self-portrait, Blackwell stands confidently before his canvas holding a
palette. He is formally dressed with the collar epaulettes and insignia
of a hog modeled upon the order of the golden fleece of the Spanish
monarchy - a clever play on Velazquez’s red cross of Santiago, worn to
boast of his knighthood in this coveted noble order. These references,
and others, suggest the fluent visual and expressive allusions to
Velazquez in Blackwell’s art.
We can likewise look to modern
masters in examining Blackwell’s work, particularly the influence of
Romare Bearden (1914-1988), another artist with southern roots. Born in
Charlotte and raised in the northeast, Bearden returned to live with
relatives in North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County during the summers of
his youth. His pioneering collage, photomontage, and painted collage
works of the 19960s, which were built on both Cubist and Surrealist
traditions, incorporated memories and imagery of the rural and urban
South that he has experienced as a youth. His example and success may
have contributed to Blackwell’s adoption of a style that evocatively
mixes figures, motifs, and scenes in paintings like No Hunting, Don’t
Ask (2002), which combines views of a fox with pig ears, two figures
that appear to be game wardens, a rooster, caged hunting dog, barbed
wire, and a primitive, striped four-legged creature encircled by an
oversized gold bracelet.
Blackwell’s art is much more than the
sum of its pats and his reflections on long standing pictorial
traditions from Baroque to Modernist. Growing up and living in the
South, Blackwell brings what he knows best to his work-thoughtfully
constructed images of changing lives and landscape, and an essential
humanity that draws us to his stories. - Roberta Sokolitz,
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