Awash in melancholy, Blue Vase combines two of Charles Blackman's favourite motifs - girls and flowers. A year before its conception in the early 1960s, Barbara Blackman – whose eyesight was diminishing – wrote of her fondness for flowers as "things I have had and still have but will not always". Here, up-close yet somehow unreachable, a figure in sorrowful awe contends with this ambivalence, using flowers as we do – to express the inexpressible.

This Artist's Proof from the Blackman Family Collections, is from the Masterwork Series by Charles Blackman and published by the Charles Blackman Foundation in acknowledgement of Charles Blackman's 90th birthday in 2018 in an edition of 190.