A Brief History - Life and Art Become One.
Tim Blashki was born in Melbourne in 1939. He attended Melbourne High School and graduated in medicine from Sydney University in 1964. In 1970 he became a member of the Royal Australia and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and in the same year obtained a Doctorate in Medicine from Melbourne University. In 1974 he became a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and in 1980 a member of the Victorian Association of Psychotherapists.
Between 1972 and 1990 he held positions as a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Royal Melbourne, Alfred, Austin, and Queen Victoria Hospitals. He also held academic positions in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne and at Monash University.
From 1971 until 2009 he worked in private practice in general Psychiatry and Psychoanalitic Psychotherapy, with both individuals and groups. Initially he practiced in General Psychiatry but later worked within the Analytic framework, where the creative and poetic aspects of his work found full expression.
Over this time he published and presented a number of papers. The early publications were of a scientific nature, the later ones more clinical, with a focus on the psychoanalitic and existential aspects of the psychotherapeutic dialogue.
In the early 1980s he first began to draw and paint. He became increasingly interested in the image as a representation of the internal world and over the next 30 years produced many thousands of sketches and cartoons, some of which are in his current exhibition. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2009 and since than has persued is interest in art full-time.
The current series of works Beyond Words maybe seen as a continuation of the narrative first begun in psychiatry. The compositions reflect a journey from psychiatry or more particularly from psychotherapy to art, from the word to the image, from the subject to the object, from reality to abstraction, from notions of existence and life cycle, to time and space. One is reminded of a quotation penned by the author Theodore Dressier in 1913..."Until in the middle ground in which we call life, somewhere between nothing and nothing, hangs the perfect thing, which we love and cannot understand, but which we are compelled to confess a work of art."
The drawings and paintings are iconic in nature; they come from the internal world of tha artist and reflect his essence. In this sense, he is less concerned with the embellishment than with the starkness of the image, within which he wishes to convey mood, feeling, thought and the instant, hence is inclination to use black and white. Beyond this, he is preoccupied with the line, distinguishing the outside from the inside, dividing the inside into a myriad of shapes and sizes, angular, circular, square, directional or diffuse, light and dark planes. Colour is used to convey mood, to facilitate the image entering the eye of the viewer who may be drawn into the colour innately affected by its presence or for that matter its absence.
He askes the viewer to accompany him on this journey and to hopefully have an experience that has some meaning to them. It is only a beginning...the rest is unknown.
