LONDON.- David Blackburn’s career took off from the first, when he caught the attention of Sir Kenneth Clark at the 1962 RCA degree show.

Clark, having bought a number of his drawings from the show, became Blackburn’s patron and adviser, helping to launch him on a global exploration of landscape, which informed his work from then on.

More than 50 years later Blackburn has attracted an eclectic following that includes Sister Wendy Beckett and the poet Simon Armitage. Now Messum’s celebrate the life and work of this extraordinary artist who is sadly now in ill health and unlikely to work again.

The close to 50 works on show at the Cork Street gallery from February 17 to March 11. chart Blackburn’s career, themes and development from 1962 to 2010, providing a timely retrospective of a man once said to belong to the same tradition as Samuel Palmer when he “fused the fervent vision of Blake with the tradition of the landscape sketch”.

Originally a textile artist, Blackburn works largely in pastel, much of his art influenced by his time in Australia. Fellow artist Maxwell Doig neatly encapsulates the transitional point at which Blackburn works, saying that he is “not a landscape artist not an abstractionist in the ordinary sense. He is a painter of metamorphosis”.

Brian Fallon, one of Ireland foremost art critics, declared that Blackburn’s works show “a virtuoso handling of their medium and a very individual colour sense. Though they often have a basis in landscape, they are virtually abstract and stress a delicate linear sense, as fine as filigree, which cuts across and counterpoints the almost tropical glow of the colour.”

‘Sublime’ and ‘spiritual’ are two more words critics have used to describe Blackburn’s work, and the echoes of primitive Australian art can also be found in Elspeth Moncrieff’s view that they float between dream and reality.

Yet, as Simon Armitage discovered, Blackburn is also very down to earth. Wanting to use a Blackburn image at the front of a poetry book, he visited him in his Huddersfield studio:

“I remember driving round that part of town, expecting some granite and chrome, some tubular steel and glass structure. But it's just a house. He was working in the dining room on what I presume was a kitchen table.”

It wasn’t just Sir Kenneth Clark who influenced the young artist; Norman Adams, Hugh Casson, Julian Trevelyan, John Cowper Powys and Patrick White all inspired him early on.

Claude, Palmer and the Pembrokeshire landscapes of Sutherland helped shape his work as he travelled Europe in 1963 before heading for Australia and the influence of leading artists there, such as Nolan and McCubbins.

His later works take in his American experience, with more than a nod to the late Richard Diebenkorn, whose star his risen so much in the past year.

The importance of Australia is further reflected in the opening of Blackburn’s first exhibition in the Argus Gallery, Melbourne, in 1965. He later sold through Agnew’s in London, and now sells exclusively via Messum’s.

Blackburn was also never far from prominence in the world of academe. In 1966, he completed Creation, 21 separate charcoals put together over four years, for Merton College, Oxford, where he was a Visiting Fellow in 1974. He also lectured at the School of Architecture in Manchester, the Department of Architecture at the University of Melbourne, and was Visiting Professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC in 1981.

And he exhibited in both Washington and New York in the early 1980s, at Yale Centre for British Art in 1989, with a show at Dulwich Picture Gallery in between, as well as travelling in Canada.

Further work in the North of England and again in Australia widened his perspective even more.

Messum’s show captures Blackburn’s development from the dark and brooding Resurrection triptych of 1962, through the more colourful but no-less unsettling Three Studies for An Apocalypse from 1967, to the captivating lighter works of the late 1970s Australian period and then on to the mature central Australian desert landscape studies of the early to mid 1980s and beyond.

Art critic Andrew Lambirth describes Blackburn as “a loner who has gone against the trend and sought his own path”.

“The painting can be a sort of diagram of the sensations of walking through a landscape, rather than a literal description or evocation of that landscape.”

And Lambirth concludes: “In the breathtaking lucidity of his paintings we experience both intimacy and majesty.”

Prices range from around £6500 to £8500.

David Blackburn at Messum’s runs from February 17 to March 11.