Charles Blackman stands among Australia’s most beloved and collected artists. With a career as distinctive as it was diverse, Blackman had a rare gift for distilling universal truths through the lens of personal experience and unsparing emotional candour.

Born in Sydney in 1928, Blackman began drawing and writing at an early age, eventually forging a path that would reshape Australian modernism. In 1951, he married his great muse, Barbara Blackman (née Patterson), whose influence would permeate much of his most recognisable work. A year later, he formed a profound creative alliance with a circle of leading avant-garde artists, including Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, and Joy Hester, and became closely associated with patrons John and Sunday Reed. These relationships, along with his co-founding of the Contemporary Artists Society and his role in penning the 'Antipodean Manifesto' in 1959, proved foundational to his legacy and to the broader trajectory of modern Australian art.

During this pivotal period, Blackman unveiled his celebrated Schoolgirl and Alice series. The former, haunted by the real-life tragedy of a murdered schoolgirl, captures vulnerability and innocence against a backdrop of unease. The latter, a deeply personal reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, was inspired by Barbara’s fading eyesight and inner world. Together, these works established Blackman as an artist of emotional depth, literary imagination, and painterly lyricism.

Over the decades, Blackman's reputation only deepened. He received both national and international acclaim, with his works now held in every major public collection across Australia and in numerous private collections around the world. In 1977, he was awarded an OBE for his services to the arts. Charles Blackman passed away in 2018 at the age of 90.