The renowned photorealist painter Tom Blackwell, 82, and a longtime presence in the Hudson Valley, succumbed April 8 to COVID-19 complications at a Poughkeepsie hospital whose name was not included in death announcements made by his longtime New York City gallery, Louis K. Meisel, which will be running a show of Blackwell’s work through May.
Most recently, Blackwell and his wife of 50-plus years, the author Linda Chase, lived in Rhinebeck. The artist first came to the Hudson Valley in the 1960s, when he took a job running a Woodstock gallery as a step towards getting closer to the New York City art world, which he moved in to and became a dominant force in by the late 1960s, early 1970s.
Born in Chicago, Illinois on March 9, 1938, Blackwell became inspired to paint at age 11 following a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago for a van Gogh exhibit. When in high school, his family relocated to California where the teenager started selling small watercolor paintings inspired by the landscape of nearby Yosemite National Park, with inspiration and support from the region’s renowned photographer, Ansel Adams.
Blackwell enlisted in the Navy at age 17, planning to follow his service with G.I. Bill-funded art education that never materialized when the popular program changed its guidelines. Instead he joined the long-established arts colony in Laguna Beach, California, then considered not only one of the hottest hippie enclaves outside San Francisco, but a nexus for experimental new trends in visual arts.
Establishing himself as an abstract expressionist, Blackwell moved on to try his hand at Pop Art while moving on from Laguna Beach to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and then Woodstock. By the late 1960s he was in New York City’s then-fresh SoHo district, where he and Chase bought and renovated a former industrial loft (with Ornette Coleman a renter at one time), and Blackwell’s arts reputation took off with the inclusion of his Pop-inspired painting “Gook”, a reaction to the Vietnam War, included in a Whitney Museum of American Art, and his concurrent move into the new world of Photorealism alongside Chuck Close, Richard Estes and others.
By the early 70s, Blackwell’s iconic large-scale paintings of chrome- and reflection-dominated motorcycles and car engines garnered critical praise and the interest of museum and private collectors. By 1976, he was represented exclusively by Meisel, a regular in key museum shows, and the focus of a growing number of art world articles and books. This prompted him to expand his focus to ever-more-complex subject matter, including store windows in urban settings.
“The year he joined my gallery he painted the landmark Jaffrey. In this composition, he painted a classic Blackwell motorcycle in front of a small-town store window, beautifully combining what are the two most important themes of his work… It is not often that an artist has a major and key work acquired by arguably the most important museum in the world, the Museum of Modern Art,” Meisel wrote of Blackwell this week. “Since that time, we have shared many wonderful years working together. Tom Blackwell was always a leader of the Photorealist movement, right up through the digital age.”
Blackwell was always quick to note how painting in the highly detailed style of Photorealism – which would often mean a work would take many months to complete as he worked a full daily regiment – provided, “the opportunity to explore the complex visual experience of the contemporary world, the complexities of the light, the shadings of color, tonality and spatial relationships.”
In other words, Blackwell – always a true painter’s painter – relished the entire practice of his craft as well as its art, even when he bristled at the failure of some of his more experimental works – including a prescient series of “Montage Paintings” juxtaposing ancient/rural elements with contemporary and even digital imagery – failed to match the expectations of his established collectors.
After SoHo, Blackwell and Chase moved on to New Hampshire and the Catskill Mountains community of New Kingston before settling in Rhinebeck, with him expanding his horizons by teaching in the Masters Program of the School of Visual Arts in New York and serving as artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College, Keene State University, New Hampshire and the University of Arizona.
I recall Tom as a quiet, reflective, sweet-tempered man with a deep sense of humor. We all drove his cats and art supplies down to Florida on one occasion, spent many an evening under starry skies in the Catskills talking about finding ways to match the beauty of art with the beauty of life.
I also recall how meticulous Blackwell could be, and how perturbed he was every time I wrote a piece about he and his art… noting every wrongly-placed piece of punctuation or insinuation of age, or a possible diminishing of success over the years.
“I love the way these images caught by the photograph confound your visual expectations,” Blackwell once said. In a quote he shared with me. “The way the outside world intrudes or gets invited in by the reflections, whether it’s a chrome hubcap, a rear view mirror or a plate glass window.”
Tom Blackwell, a truly great painter, is survived by his wife, Linda Chase, his step-daughter, Leila Knox, his brothers Patrick and James and his sister Janet.
Join the family! 
