Scottish painter and printmaker, notable as the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy.
In 1962 she began teaching at Edinburgh College of Art where she continued until her retirement in 1986. She graduated in 1954 with first-class degree and was awarded both a Carnegie travelling scholarship by the Royal Scottish Academy and an Andrew Grant Postgraduate Scholarship by Edinburgh College of Art. She spent much of the money travelling throughout Europe where she picked up influences from various sources, focusing on classical and Byzantine art. She also travelled to Japan and America.
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 considered space between objects carefully. She also painted 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.
In 1956 she married painter John Houston. He died in 2008. She died in Edinburgh on 23 August 2021, aged 89.
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