In 1962, she began teaching atEdinburgh College of Art where she continued until her retirement in 1986. Blackadder worked in a variety of media such as oil paints, watercolour, drawing, and printmaking. In her still life paintings and drawings, she considered space between objects carefully. She also painted portraits and landscapes, but her later work contains mainly her cats and flowers rendered in great detail. Her work can be seen at theTate Gallery, theScottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and theMuseum of Modern Art in New York,[3] and has appeared on a series ofRoyal Mail stamps.[1]
Blackadder was born and raised at 7 Weir Street,Falkirk, the third child of Thomas and Violet Isabella Blackadder. Violet Blackadder ensured Elizabeth benefited from a series of promising educational opportunities and, determined to spare her daughter the struggles she had been through, convinced her own father to support Elizabeth's training as a domestic science teacher.[5] Blackadder's father died when she was 10. Her mother died, aged 89, in 1984.[6]
She spent a substantial part of her childhood alone, due in part to a keen appetite for reading. During her teenage years Blackadder began meticulously collecting local flowers, compiling the specimens by pressing and labelling them with their full Latin names, a fascination that was to surface much later in her paintings of plants and flowers.[7]
A former pupil ofFalkirk High School, she donated one of her paintings to the school on the occasion of its centenary in 1986. She later remembered the pleasure she derived from her art classes in particular, but also enjoying dissecting and drawing plants as part of her botanical studies; she spent the majority of her sixth year in the school's art room.[7] She arrived in Edinburgh in September 1949 to start on the newly approved Fine Art degree and graduated with first class honours in 1954. Blackadder studied earlyByzantine art while at university, and one of the most enduring influences on her work was her tutor and prolific painterWilliam Gillies. Blackadder spent the fourth and fifth years of her MA course concentrating on her imminent examinations; it was during this period that she met Scottish artist John Houston who was later to become her husband.[8]
The fifth and final year of Blackadder's Fine Art degree was spent atEdinburgh College of Art, where she researched throughout the year for her dissertation onWilliam MacTaggart. She graduated in 1954 with a first-class degree and was awarded both a Carnegie travelling scholarship by theRoyal Scottish Academy and an Andrew Grant Postgraduate Scholarship by Edinburgh College of Art.[9]
In 1954, Blackadder put the money from her Carnegie scholarship towards spending three months travelling through Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy, where she focused onclassical andByzantine art.[10] In 1962 her painting,White Still Life, Easter was given theGuthrie Award for best work by a young artist at the Royal Scottish Academy.[11] During the 1960s she developed her interests in still life while continuing with her love of landscape by painting landscapes in France, Spain, Portugal, and Scotland, and acquired a growing reputation for her paintings of flowers,Flowers on an Indian Cloth being a notable example. During her travels to France she became more aware of the artistHenri Matisse, and under his influence she lightened her palette.
In the 1980s, she visited Japan on a number of occasions and many of her paintings at the time showed the influence of these trips.[3] First visiting in 1985, and returning the following year, Blackadder's interest in Eastern techniques and subject matter was realised in a series of vibrant oils and watercolours shown at the Mercury Gallery[12] in 1991.[13] Her desire to avoid the technical vibrancy ofTokyo took Blackadder to theZen gardens ofKyoto; in many ways, her work depicts the principles ofZen which give paramount importance to the idea of empty space.[14] She traveled to theUnited States of America. Souvenirs of her travels would appear in many of her paintings.
Blackadder began working atGlasgow Print Studio in 1985, after being invited to make prints there.[15] She worked with master printmakers from that time until around 2014, working predominantly to produceetchings andscreenprints with somelithographs andwoodcuts. Her subject matter was dominated by cats and flowers but also included images from travels in Europe and Japan.[16]
Blackadder was the first woman to be an academician of both the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Royal Scottish Academy; in 1982 she was appointed anOBE for her contribution to art[17] she was promoted to aDBE in2003.
In 1956 she married painterJohn Houston. The couple took up residence in a large villa inThe Grange district of Edinburgh, which she continued to occupy until her death in 2021.[25] She was widowed in 2008.[26]
The Scottish Gallery, Aitken Dott, Edinburgh, 1961
Mercury Gallery, London, 1965
The Scottish Gallery, Aitken Dott, Edinburgh 1966
Thames Gallery, Eton, 1966
Mercury Gallery, London, 1967
Reading Art Gallery and Museum, 1968
Lane Art Gallery, Bradford, 1968
New Paintings, Mercury Gallery, London, 14 October 1969 – 8 November 1969
Vaccarino Gallery, Florence, 1970
Scottish Arts Council Retrospective Touring Exhibition; Edinburgh, Sheffield, Aberdeen, Liverpool, Cardiff, London, 1981–82
Theo Waddington Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 1982
New Paintings, Mercury Gallery, London, 14 October 1988 – 19 November 1988
Elizabeth Blackadder, Aberystwth Arts Centre, 8 April 1989 – 20 May 1989, the Gardener Centre, Brighton, 3 June 1989 – 8 July 1989, Oriel Bangor Art Gallery, 15 July 1989 – 19 August 1989[14]
New Oils and Watercolours, Mercury Gallery, London, 22 May 1991 – 22 June 1991
New Work, Oils and Watercolours, Mercury Gallery, London, 22 September 1993 – 23 October 1993
New Oils and Watercolours, Mercury Gallery, London, 16 October 1996 – 16 November 1996
Elizabeth Blackadder, Mercury Gallery, London, 20 October 1999 – 20 November 1999
Paintings, Prints and Watercolours 1955-2000, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh 28 July 2000 – 15 September 2000
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