Thetis Blacker; Visionary batik painter
Hyfler/Rosner
Visionary batik painter
The Independent
31 January 2007
David Buckman
The artist Thetis Blacker created richly coloured pictures
notable for their symbolic and visionary qualities. She
worked in the uncommon dyed-fabric technique batik, becoming
one of its most eminent practitioners.
Blacker's pictures were commissioned for and exhibited in
cathedrals in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United
States. In England, her most conspicuous work is seen in
sets of paintings on themes such as the Creation, displayed
from time to time in Winchester, Windsor and Durham.
She was born in 1927 in Holmbury St Mary, Surrey, daughter
of the psychiatrist Carlos Paton Blacker. Thetis's
grandfather Carlos Blacker was a close friend of Oscar
Wilde.
Thetis Blacker originally planned a singing career. She
studied in London with the lieder-singer Elena Gerhardt,
appeared in the chorus at Glyndebourne in the 1950s and sang
the role of Mother Goose in Stravinsky's Rake's Progress.
(As a painter, she was to have an exhibition of work at
Glyndebourne during the summer of 2005.)
Despite this promising start, Blacker felt that her true
destiny lay in visual art. She received lessons from Brenda
Moore, wife of the artist Leonard Campbell Taylor, and
studied at Chelsea School of Art. In 1970, as a Churchill
Fellow, she visited India, Iran, Thailand, Singapore,
Malaysia and Indonesia, where she worked at the Batik
Research Institute of Yogyakarta. Visits to Peru and later
Bali helped to form Blacker's style.
In 1973 her book A Pilgrimage of Dreams appeared. Blacker
was a close friend of the poet Kathleen Raine and became a
fellow of the Temenos Academy, dedicated to "Education in
the Light of the Spirit" and founded by Raine and others in
1990.
Over the years Blacker produced memorable series based on
mythical themes. A phoenix rising from the ashes was a
favourite subject, a typically fiery example being featured
on her altar frontal in St George's Chapel, Windsor (1997),
where a major exhibition of her work was held in 2000. Other
commissions included work for St Albans Abbey, Grey College,
Durham, and - her last major work, commissioned by Blacker's
dealer Henry Dyson - banners of St Cuthbert and St Oswald
for Durham Cathedral (2001).
"She was a Blakeian," says Dyson:
Thetis believed in the divine presence in all things, that
creative art has a life and soul of its own, with
inspiration, although part of human experience, being
something that comes from a source other than the human.
Ann Thetis Blacker, painter and singer: born Holmbury St
Mary, Surrey 13 December 1927; died Bramley, Surrey 18
December 2006.