This exhibition comprises original graphics made by Charles Blackman during the thirty years of our marriage. Many of these editions were produced by Well House Press which was set up in the back cottage of our house in Paddington to publish drypoints and etchings, with myself as publisher.

In the following years and all through the eighties this collection of original prints was preserved, layered between separate sheets of tissue paper, in an antique cabinet of print drawers, later transferred to a younger cabinet of drawers in the Melbourne apartment of Felicity St John Moore, an authority on Charles  Blackman and the curator of my art collection and this exhibition. These prints are now emerging from their sheltered lives to find new homes, mostly for the first time.

The exceptions are the monoprints which came to light more recently, tucked into a sheaf of kept papers being archived by the National Library of Australia. Four monoprints from this series have been purchased for the Prints and Drawings collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.

The Mother Goose suite, drypoints by Charles Blackman, was gifted in 1996 to the Peter McCallum Hospital for the Children’s Cancer Ward. The text of these rhymes was researched and supplied by Vida Horne, long-time children’s librarian at St Kilda Library.

Charles Blackman’s works on paper are represented in the collection of The British Museum in London. They include my 2006 gift of early drawings and a set of six lithographs, The Aspendale Papers 1966-67.

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- Barbara Patterson Blackman AO