On Sunday August 4, Heide Museum of Modern Art is hosting an Art Talk and Book Launch for Christabel Blackman’s new publication, Charles and Barbara Blackman: A Decade of Love. Sparked by letters exchanged between her parents, Christabel’s book charts a romance set against Melbourne’s burgeoning avant-garde art scene. In celebration of its release, we have curated a collection of Charles’s visages of Barbara, a testament to the power of love, art and a muse.

Charles met Barbara in 1948. By 1951, they had married, moved to Melbourne and Barbara had been declared legally blind. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, she appears throughout Charles’s work, most famously as a version of Lewis Carroll’s childhood heroine Alice. Listening to the story together on Barbara’s state-of-the-art talking book machine, Charles recognised a metaphoric link between Alice and his wife – both were grappling with disorientating realities, one fantastical and the other ensnared in nascent blindness and motherhood.

Where Charles mastered the visual, Barbara was a conductor of words. She was a poet, writer, oral historian and letter writer, her missives with Judith Wright published as a book in 2007. In 2006 she won the Australiasian Sound Recordings Association Award for Excellence for her interviews with notable Australians, many of whom were artists. Her perceptiveness infuses Charles’s depictions that while intimate, never feel like an invasion of privacy. As Felicity St John Moore has written, if Barbara was Charles’s muse, he was her eyes.

"Blindness is not a negative… It is a different way of seeing." Barbara Blackman

Great loves recur throughout art history – Frida and Diego, Ulay and Marina. In Australia, it’s Charles and Blackman, partners in art, love and through the unfolding of the avant-garde. What is life without a muse?