Beschreibung:

DUNADRY BANKS, FOUR VIEWS AFTER THE POEM OF THE SAME NAME BY PAUL YATES Basil Blackshaw HRHA RUA (1932-2016)
Signature: three signed lower right; one signed lower left Medium: mixed media on paper; (4) Dimensions: 11½ x 11½in. (29.21 x 29.21cm) Provenance: Whyte's, 28 November 2006, lot 29; Private collection Exhibited: Literature: The four Dunadry mixed-media paintings [lot 72], refer to a Poem-and-Prints limited edition for U.N.I.C.E.F. None of these works can be classed as illustration. In some cases, Basil responded to a spe... ecific poem, in others the poet responded to Basil's images, but as the painter Jack Pakenham trenchantly noted, they were all 'independent images sparked off in his imagination by the poems' Brian McAvera, October 2017 Painted in response to the poem, Dunadry Banks, by Paul Yates this was the first in a series of artistic collaborations between Blackshaw and Yates. The poem and images relate to a particular stretch of the Six Mile Water area at Dunadry, Co. Antrim. Blackshaw spent a formative period in his life there and would walk by the river several times daily with a canine companion. While Yates’ poem portrays the area by moonlight, Blackshaw chose to respond with images drawn from memories of summer days spent along the river. Most recently the pair worked together on Mourne, published by the Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast, with poems by Yates and images by Blackshaw. Jack Pakenham, in his introduction to Mourne, remarked: “Paul and Basil are true ‘eccentrics’, that is in the literal sense to be found in the original Greek word ek kentros meaning literally ‘out of centre’ or ‘beyond the centre’, the Greeks believing that the vast majority of people interpreted reality from a central core but that original thinkers saw the world from the circumference and therefore offered quite different perspectives. Paul and Basil have struck up a friendship and professional collaboration based upon each having a unique way of seeing and portraying things and recognising in each other ‘fellow souls’”. In 1994 a series of smaller sized lithographs of the Dunadry Banks images were made. The effects of a burst water tank where the lithographs were being stored resulted in very few sets remaining in existence. These sets of prints will soon be available for sale exclusively through Brown Thomas Dublin. Dunadry Banks by Paul Yates The river is a lady in evening dress strip teasing in the moonlight, Slipping off shoals of silver fox shadow gloves and silk sounding Stockings with toes as pointed as eels, trailing a wake of slinking Pine marten stoll in long hushed curves, slipping past you sleek As a limousine, its twisting and turning lingering like French perfume. The river is landing strip for the ghosts of hoar frosted moon hounds Knifing the gun metal cold water to hunt down love note paper Boats torn from the pages of Gray’s Anatomy, to sniff out nude shaped Stowaways and the helter - skelter descents of ripple mimicking Leaves inspired by Leonardo’s designs for future flying machines. The river is informer revealing the secret weddings of clouds in the Night, reporting the trombone lunged small talk of distant covens Of stay out cattle, embellishing the taffeta wrestled whispers of angels Casting their wings in the tree tops, signing in tongues of liquid silver And gold the child’s play and opera of their laughter. The river is glass bottomed heavens stream of consciousness of past And present equi – distant from eternity; Zen Of a man walking a dog and dowsing through its leash the pull Of infinity walking through the walls of the banks, an un-beginning Unending quietening running true to itself all the way. Paul Yates November 2006. more