Cyril's Kite over Blackwoods Hill | Etching 67 of 75

About the Artwork

Cyril's Kite over Blackwood's Hill is a 15" × 36" colour etching and aquatint by David Blackwood RCA (1941–2022), edition 67/75. Set in Wesleyville, Newfoundland, the composition gathers the houses and topography of Blackwood's childhood street, viewed from the rise he called Blackwood's Hill. A white kite arcs across the twilight sky, its long tail sweeping in a curve of bright colour—made, as Blackwood noted, from "rolled up pages of Eaton's / Simpson's catalogues."¹

The homes are all real. In a 1996 letter to West End Gallery, Blackwood identified each one and drew a map of the street.¹ At the centre stands the house marked "Capt Bishop / Blackwood"—his grandparents' home and general store. "My grandmother, my father and I were born in this home!" he wrote. To the left, the large house was "built by the Winsors on my grandmother Blackwood's side of the family." Reading left to right across the composition: Uncle Sam Kelloway, Capt W.C. Winsor, Skipper Jim Hill, the Blackwood house, William Fifield, Ephraim Kelloway, and finally Cyril Best—"our next door neighbour"—whose kite gives the print its title. The far right points toward St. Coleman's.

The Kelloway houses held lasting importance in Blackwood's art. In a 1990 artist's statement, he recalled the brothers Alphus, Jacob, and Ephraim Kelloway as "the next door neighbours of my childhood." While the community was known for brightly painted houses, the Kelloway place was "known for its greyness"—a weathered grey clapboard house that "had not been painted in living memory." Yet for several summers in the mid-1950s, Ephraim Kelloway painted his barn door "some say fifty times": whitewash, then black, yellow, brown, red, blue, stovepipe silver, and "bed room" pink, eventually adding "a variety of hinges, a horseshoe, a half model of a boat and cutouts of brightly coloured and lettered tin."² That memory inspired the etching Ephraim Kelloway's Door (1981) and reappeared in Passing Shadow (1990). The same neighbourhood re-emerges here in Cyril's Kite, uniting a lifetime of imagery rooted in community, memory, and the ordinary made luminous. The work rewards extended viewing.

Dimensions and Details

• Title: Cyril's Kite over Blackwood's Hill
• Artist: David Blackwood RCA (1941–2022)
• Year: 1996
• Size: 15" × 36" (38.1 × 91.4 cm) plate
• Medium: Colour etching and aquatint on paper
• Edition: 67/75
• Condition: Excellent; professionally framed and archivally presented

Exceptional Archival Documentation

This artwork has been cross-referenced with original archival materials in the West End Gallery collection:

• Handwritten letter from David Blackwood identifying each home in the composition (1996)
• Hand-drawn map by the artist locating the houses on Blackwood's Hill
• Artist's statement from Station Art Gallery 20th Anniversary Exhibition (1990) recounting the story of Ephraim Kelloway's painted barn door

These documents provide rare insight into the autobiographical sources of Blackwood's Wesleyville imagery and allow the collector to narrate this work with the artist's own words.