Elizabeth Blackadder's Botanicals
Dame Elizabeth Blackadder (1931 – 2021) was an incredibly prolific Scottish artist, most well known for her delicate botanical artworks and her paintings of cats. As a teenager, she was an avid collector of flowers, pressing and labeling them, and this love of flora would have a huge influence on her artwork. A lot of her botanical paintings do look just like pressed flowers - she manages to beautifully capture the delicacy of each petal.
Elizabeth Blackadder studied at the Edinburgh College of Art, where she was taught by the artist Sir William Gillies. During her studies, she met her husband John Houston, whom she married in 1956. In 1962, a few years after graduating, she returned to the college to teach part-time, and would remain teaching there until her retirement in 1986.
Her style varied hugely, with some of her earlier works in oil or printmaking techniques looking very different to her delicate botanicals. We think it’s so inspiring how she just produced the art that she wanted to, without worrying about sticking to one medium or style. From soft watercolours to thick oil paint, from scratchy etchings to bold linocuts, Elizabeth Blackadder tried a little of everything and excelled at it all. Her use of colour is fantastic, with many of her earlier works being influenced by the bold and vibrant colour palettes in fauvist art.
While the medium and style of her art changed wildly throughout the years, and even from piece to piece, the subject matter remained largely the same. Elizabeth Blackadder liked to work mostly on still lifes (primarily botanicals), but she also loved painting cats. Most of her art had quite plain backgrounds - she was unafraid of empty space, which she would break into with swooping shapes.
In 1982 she was awarded an OBE for her contributions to art, and in 2003 she received the title of DBE. Her paintings and prints are displayed in the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Scottish National Museum of Art.
We’ve had botanicals on our minds all year, with the steady expansion of our botanicals range. It’s quite rare to see flowers like Blackadder’s, where they’re depicted against a plain background – she really lets the plants she paints speak for themselves.
We try to achieve something similar in our botanical embroideries by showing the bold shapes of each individual flower and pairing this with strong colour palettes and exciting stitches. Our flowers are far more naive in style than Blackadder’s, more in fitting with our other embroidery kit ranges, but we love the joy and experimentation she found in her work.
If you don’t know the story behind our botanicals range of embroideries, they in fact stem from Eppie’s embroidered wedding dress, which she wrote about here and here. Once Eppie completed her wedding dress, she decided to help each individual design find new life in the form of our flower embroidery kits.
