Power Flowers

IN an age that seems to value self-seeking publicity above all else, it's a truly refreshing experience to meet Elizabeth Blackadder. In fact, not unlike her internationally renowned paintings, it is even life-affirming. Too much of an accolade for any one individual to carry, you think? Possibly, but pile it on with the rest of the honours this artist has received over the years and it would simply get lost in the crush.

The Falkirk-born painter, whose latest exhibition has just opened at Browse and Derby in London, is the first woman artist ever to be elected a member of both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy in London and is the newly appointed personal painter to the Queen - the first woman to hold the post in its 300-year history. She has work on show in London and New York, and has been exhibiting since 1959. It is an astonishing track record that brings with it unwelcome publicity - engagement with the media is part of an artist's job these days, but that doesn't mean Blackadder has to like it.

She doesn't enjoy interviews, she tells me when we retire to a comfortable sofa after a quick tour of her studios (she has two in her Edinburgh home - one for watercolours and one for oils). "It's very good that people want to interview me and the gallery of course are quite keen. But it's maybe not my " Her voice trails off slightly. She's a softly spoken, gently amusing woman who shies away from the celebrity that her art has brought her, almost shooing it off her the way she might one of the pet cats she so regularly features in her paintings. It is a distraction from the work, she says - now in her early 70s, she still works every day, answering letters in the morning and painting from the afternoon into late evening. Her studios are just what you imagine an artist's studios to be like - full of light; full of canvases, some finished, some not; etchings fighting for space on the walls alongside a jumble of postcards, photographs and notes.

Her work, famous for its delicate but strong still lives of lilies, irises and tulips, as well as abstract scenes and paintings of cats, is sometimes described rather patronisingly as "modest" or "domestic", but these adjectives don't bother her at all. "You could say a lot of painters were 'domestic'," she says of critics' responses. "Bonnard was 'domestic' - but I don't think of my work like that."

Defiantly, then, her present exhibition includes many of those images categorised in this way - there is a chalk and wash painting of a black and white cat, many still lives of the familiar lilies and some landscape scenes from time spent in Italy, a country Blackadder visited as a young graduate, and to which she often returns.

There is a romance to Blackadder's life story that her work evinces even if she resists it, laughing at the thought of such a suggestion. Born in 1931 she was, she tells me, always interested in art and always encouraged through school, even though she hadn't really any clear idea of what she was going to do when she left.

"I didn't know what being an artist was," she smiles, before telling me her mother didn't quite approve of her decision to go to art school as it wasn't quite a "proper" choice. She even toyed with the idea of doing museum work instead, before heading off for the Edinburgh College of Art.

It was just after she had graduated from the college in the early 1950s that she won a travel scholarship to Italy for a year. It may have been the era of Roman Holiday but well-brought-up young ladies from Edinburgh didn't make a habit of joining Gregory Peck on the back of a motorcycle in Rome. Nevertheless, Blackadder headed off to Italy on her own - there was another female student travelling there too and they would occasionally meet up, but by and large, she was there by herself - and travelled around Italy absorbing Byzantine art as well as work by contemporary Italian painters.

"It was quite an experience," she says. "People didn't travel all that much then, there wasn't much money and it was just after the war but it was a marvellous experience. Many of the places I went to were quite difficult to reach - monasteries and so on - but it was a great opportunity to see the history."

The effect of this trip on her subsequent work is huge, she admits. "Just being able to see these things," she says. "There weren't the number of books and journals coming into college then as there is now - now you're so conscious of what's happening in the world, but then it wasn't so easy to see."

Just a few years after she came home and married fellow painter John Houston, she had her first exhibition and three years later she was offered a part-time teaching post at Edinburgh College of Art, a position she held for over 20 years. In the early 1980s she visited Japan, following a long love affair with Japanese art, and what was intended to be one visit became the first of many. Ever since the 1960s, her work has been in demand and, perhaps as a result of this commercial success, her place in the pantheon of contemporary Scottish painters is a largely unambiguous one. If Peter Howsen is the controversialist and Jack Vettriano the populist, then Elizabeth Blackadder is undoubtedly the establishment.

It's an easy way to see her but it doesn't tell the whole story. Shunning publicity herself, yet outselling every other artist in the Royal Academy shop (I couldn't quite bring myself to tell her I own a fridge magnet of her painting Two Cats And Flowers), Blackadder is a far more interesting conundrum than she would appear from her seemingly smooth, straightforward path to success. Shy, slightly nervous and extremely polite when you meet her, she will break into a sudden smile that completely alters her face, banishing any hint of timidity. She doesn't believe she has suffered from any kind of sexism throughout her career, citing the fortunate precedent of women painters like Ann Redpath and Joan Eardley, who made it "accepted that women could actually be painters. The men who taught us treated us all exactly the same."

Pinning her down even on the question of her own work elicits an ambiguous response. When I ask what this latest exhibition represents, she tells me: "You always hope that there is some kind of development - quite a few new things are coming up in this one." When I probe further, asking, what kind of new things, she smiles suddenly at me once again.

"It's very difficult you see, because you're speaking a different language. I find it quite difficult because I'm working in a visual language and to say, 'I think this is slightly different from what I've been doing,' just isn't going to work."

Looking back to the time she began her career, Blackadder notes that the commercial climate has changed for the better. "There is much more encouragement now for young artists and many more opportunities of showing your work," she says. "When I began, there weren't the galleries - there was one gallery in Edinburgh which showed the Scottish colourists and Ann Redpath, but there weren't any galleries where young people could get their work shown. And people buy paintings now! They didn't then. I think now you have a lot more competition of course if you're starting out, but you also have a lot more opportunities."

The time has passed when Elizabeth Blackadder needed opportunities - now, one suspects, what she mostly needs is time. Time to get on with the work, away from interference from the media and the attention a certain kind of celebrity brings. And those of us who admire her work, and want to see more of it, will just have to let her have it.

Recent Work by Elizabeth Blackadder is at Browse and Derby, 19 Cork Street, London, until December 20. Admission is free Name: Elizabeth Blackadder Born: September 24 1931, Falkirk One of Scotland's top painters, Blackadder was educated at Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1950s and then taught there from 1962 until 1986. A member of the Royal Academy, she was awarded an OBE in 1982.

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