Elizabeth Blackadder
1931-
Painter
Dame Elizabeth Violet Blackadder, DBE, RA, RSA (Falkirk) is a Scottish painter and printmaker. She is the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy.
A former pupil of Falkirk High School, she donated one of her paintings to the school on the occasion of its centenary in 1986. She studied at both the Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh University where she graduated with first class honours in 1954.
In 1962 she began teaching at Edinburgh College of Art where she continued until her retirement in 1986. Blackadder worked in a variety of media such as oil paints, watercolour, drawing and printmaking. She attended Glasgow Print Studio where she worked with print makers to produce etchings and screen prints of flowers. In her still life paintings and drawings, she considers space between objects carefully. She also paints portraits and landscapes but her later work contains mainly her cats and flowers with extreme detail.
Her work can be seen at the Tate Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has appeared on a series of Royal Mail stamps.
She was appointed an OBE in 1982, promoted to DBE in 2003. In 2001, she was appointed Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner in Scotland. She has been awarded honorary doctorates by four universities.
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