30 Sep 2021 Celebrating Artistic Excellence: Selma Blackburn

By Aaron Brand

As an artist, teacher, and explorer of watercolor’s ways, Selma Blackburn can look back on decades of beautiful artwork.

Blackburn has long been an advocate for all things watercolor as a member of Mid-Southern Watercolorists since 1977. As the Arkansas-based nonprofit arts organization puts it, the two are synonymous.

With MSW, she found common cause with a medium where she has flourished. But that’s not where she began.

“Actually, I started in oils with Doris Mapes. She was teaching private classes at the same place where I was teaching preschool and kindergarten,” Blackburn recalled. Try watercolors, suggested Mapes.

“It was a whole different set of materials and so forth,” Blackburn said. New directions drew her in.

“I started her class in watercolors, and I was hooked from the moment that I started,” Blackburn remembered.

What hooked her? Design and composition were the start, but technique would come along. She was accepted into an MSW exhibition, which brought a workshop invitation to Louisiana Tech University.

“I came back a changed woman,” she recalled. “Because the thing that had to happen was I had to believe in my heart that I could do this. I had always thought of myself as an observer of art, but not a creator of art.”

She wanted to find her creative juices and bring them to the surface.

“I use my brush to express my creative ideas,” Blackburn said. “The emphasis from then on became my heart and my hand and my mind, working together, concentrating on process rather than on product.”

She committed herself to the starts and stops, practicing the craft, learning from invaluable teachers. Why watercolors?

“Because it has so many surprises,” Blackburn said. “The surface and the brushes and the paints all work together to create the images. Learning to let the painting speak back to me as I was painting it almost without a lot of guidance, just with a lot of understanding of design.”

She’s tried different varieties of watercolor paper, finding a few she likes: smooth and rough surfaces. She enjoys gouache.

“I like the contrast of the transparency and the opacity,” Blackburn said.

The properties of mark-making also appeal to her, such as crayons and stamping lines, guided by the elements of design she knows. She likes print-making tools like blocks.

For Mid-Southern Watercolorists, Blackburn has served in several essential positions: president, juried exhibition chair, secretary, and a vital member-at-large. Her work itself found homes in nearly three dozen of those annual juried shows.

Her teaching career totals roughly three decades of instruction at Hendrix College, Arkansas Arts Center (where she taught 27 years), Louisiana Tech, and privately in her studio.

As a true teacher should, she works with ideas. She can be representational or go more abstract.

“Sometimes the idea is just to see what I can do with shapes, colors, and spaces without representing anything. And I let the painting tell me what it’s going to be. And then I name it,” Blackburn said.

Occasionally, she thinks of the name first, then paints.

“I’ve done that as a challenge to my students, also,” Blackburn said.

From students, she’s learned a lot. “It helped me sharpen my skills so that I could teach idea-making to the people who are taking my classes. They were wonderful learners, and because of that over the years I had occasion to be so proud of the students that came out of my classes who have gone on to do wonderful things themselves,” she said.

It’s been a boost to her, that connection between teacher and student. Art, as communication, provides the way forward.

“I think connections are what the world is all about,” Blackburn said.