Chapter 9 The Blur: Unveiling the Ineffable in the Art of Clarice Beckett

In: Numinous Fields: Perceiving the Sacred in Nature, Landscape, and Art
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Tracey Lock
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Abstract

Clarice Beckett (1887–1935) is regarded as one of Australia’s most important painters of the 20th century. Her art was shadowed by slow recognition owing to its unusual, blurred appearance and the artist’s utter silence on her artistic approach. Silence and the blur shrouded Beckett’s work with a deep sense of mystery, which rational art critics had difficulties interpreting. Thus, the meaning and significance of the blur—the hallmark at the heart of Beckett’s painting practice—has remained unexamined and unexplored. By using the “blur” as a conceptual frame of analysis, this paper aims to unveil Beckett’s elusive spiritual inclinations and the reflection of such orientations in her art. With reference to her life experiences, I argue that in a deep sense the blur was Beckett’s inventive device for allowing the eye to perceive beyond her mundane renderings of nature. I further argue that Beckett’s blurring painting method fused and transmuted notions of light, silence, form, emptiness, space and time to activate aspects of the spiritual and the numinous. My aim is to suggest that the deep feelings of desire and love and states of transcendental awareness the blur awakens in the art of Clarice Beckett are sacred in origin thereby freeing her art from the formal disciplinary limitations of modernism.

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