Peter Blake (artist)

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other people with the same name, see Peter Blake (disambiguation).

RA
Blake in 2016
Born
Peter Thomas Blake

(1932-06-25) 25 June 1932 (age 91)
Dartford, Kent, England
EducationRoyal College of Art
Known forPainting, printmaking, collage
Notable workSelf-Portrait with Badges, 1961
MovementPop art
Spouses
  • ​
    ​
    (m. 1963; div. 1979)​
  • Chrissy Wilson
    ​
    (m. 1987)​
Children3
Tate Gallery

Sir Peter Thomas Blake

Brit Award statuette.[2]

Blake is a prominent figure in the pop art movement.[1] Central to his paintings are his interest in images from popular culture which have infused his collages. In 2002 he was knighted at Buckingham Palace for his services to art.[1]

Early life

Peter Blake was born in

Gravesend Technical College school of art, and the Royal College of Art.[3]

Career

Tate Gallery

From the late 1950s, Blake's paintings included imagery from advertisements,

Swinging London and bringing him into contact with leading figures of popular culture. Blake had his first solo exhibition with Robert Fraser Gallery in 1965 and appeared on the front cover of LIFE International in a photograph by Lord Snowdon.[4] Blake was given the final exhibition held at Robert Fraser Gallery which closed in 1969. The same year, Blake had his first exhibition with Waddington Galleries, owned by Leslie Waddington who became his lifelong supporter and representative.[5] In 1999, Blake painted Leslie Waddington with Portrait of a Young Man by Hans Memling.[6]

Blake participated in

Prince Edward's charity television special The Grand Knockout Tournament
in 1987.

Work

On the Balcony (1955–1957) is a significant early work which remains an iconic piece of British Pop Art, showing Blake's interest in combining images from pop culture with fine art. The work, which appears to be a collage but is wholly painted, shows, among other things, a boy on the left of the composition holding

Honoré Sharrer depicting workers holding famous paintings, Workers and Paintings.[7] At the "Pop Art in Changing Britain" exhibit and as reported by The Telegraph on 21 February 2018, his Girls with Their Hero, a 1959 painting of facets of Elvis Presley was said to have "fashioned a highly personal form of Pop Art, infused by nostalgia for Victoriana and a long-lost world of native pastimes". Blake has referred to the work of other artists many times. His Captain Webb Matchbox, based on a Bryant & May matchbox design featuring the first man to swim the Channel unaided, is another of his early works in the pop art movement.[1] Another example, The First Real Target (1961) a standard archery target with the title written across the top is a play on paintings of targets by Kenneth Noland and Jasper Johns
.

Blake has been commissioned to create many album sleeves. He designed the sleeve for

Brand New Boots and Panties (2001; Blake was Dury's tutor at Walthamstow School of Art in the early 60s). He designed the sleeves for Pentangle's Sweet Child, The Who's Face Dances (1981), which features portraits of the band by a number of artists, and 38 years later, The Who's WHO
(2019).

In 1968, commissioned by Dodo Editions, Blake made Babe Rainbow, a

screen-print on tinplate, in an edition of 10,000, which sold for £1 each.[10][11][12][13][14]

In 1969, Blake left London to live near Bath. His work changed direction to feature scenes based on English Folklore and characters from Shakespeare. In the early 1970s, he made a set of

watercolour paintings to illustrate Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass using a young artist, Celia Wanless, as the model for Alice and in 1975 he was a founder of the Brotherhood of Ruralists
. Blake moved back to London in 1979 and his work returned to earlier popular culture references.

In 1990 and 1991, Blake painted the artwork to

live album 24 Nights. A scrapbook featuring all of Blake's drawing was later released. In January 1992, Blake appeared on BBC2's acclaimed Arena Masters of the Canvas documentary and painted the portrait of the wrestler Kendo Nagasaki.[15]

In June 2006, as The Who returned to play Leeds University 36 years after recording their seminal Live at Leeds album in 1970, Blake unveiled a Live at Leeds 2 artwork to commemorate the event. The artist and The Who's Pete Townshend signed an edition which will join the gallery's collection. More recently, Blake has created artist's editions for the opening of the Pallant House Gallery which houses collections of his most famous paintings. The works are homages to his earlier work on the Stanley Road album cover and Babe Rainbow prints. He designed a series of deck chairs.

In 2006, Blake designed the cover for

Kings Road in Chelsea, London
.

Blake created an updated version of Sgt. Pepper—with famous figures from Liverpool history—for the campaign for Liverpool to become European Capital of Culture in 2008, and created a series of prints to celebrate Liverpool's status.[16] In 2008, Blake painted a pig for the public art event King Bladud's Pigs in Bath in the city of Bath.[17]

A fan of

Chelsea Football Club, Blake designed a collage to promote the team's home kit in 2010. He also designed a shopping bag for the Lucky Brand Jeans
company for the holiday season.

As part of 'The Big Egg Hunt' February 2012 Sir Peter Blake designed an egg on behalf of Dorchester Collection. Blake created the carpet which runs through the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom's Middlesex Guildhall building.[18]

As he approached his 80th birthday, Blake undertook a project to recreate the

British cultural icons of his life that he most admires.[19] He stated: "I had a very long list of people who I wanted to go in but couldn't fit everyone in – I think that shows how strong British culture and its legacy of the last six decades is."[19][20] The new version was created for a special birthday celebration of Blake's life at fashion designer Wayne Hemingway's Vintage festival at Boughton House, Northamptonshire in July 2012.[19]

An exhibition was held at

I Still Do
.

In March 2020, Blake's poster London Stands Together was distributed in every copy of London's Evening Standard newspaper.[23]

Honours

Blake became a

Prince Charles in an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace.[1] Retrospectives of Blake's work were held at the Tate in 1983 and Tate Liverpool in 2008.[26]
In February 2005, the Sir Peter Blake Music Art Gallery, located in the School of Music, University of Leeds, was opened by the artist. The permanent exhibition features 20 examples of Blake's album sleeve art, including the only public showing of a signed print of his Sgt. Pepper's artwork.

In March 2011, Blake was awarded an honorary DMus from the University of Leeds, and marked by the public unveiling of his artwork for the Boogie For Stu album. On 18 July 2011, Blake was awarded an honorary degree for Doctor of Art from Nottingham Trent University. In 2014 he was made an honorary academician at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol.

Solo exhibitions

source:[27]

Personal life

Blake was married to the American-born artist Jann Haworth from 1963 to 1979, and they had two daughters together, Liberty and Daisy.[28] In 1980, Blake met fellow artist Chrissy Wilson, they married in 1987, and have a daughter, Rose.[28][29]

Blake has lived in Chiswick, London, since 1967.[3] His "vast" studio there is a former ironmonger's warehouse.[30]

Bibliography

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e "Pop art star knighted". BBC News. 10 October 2002. Retrieved 13 March 2012.
  2. ^ "Damien Hirst's 2013 Brit Award statue unveiled". BBC. 1 December 2016.
  3. ^ a b Nikkah, Royah (20 November 2016). "Sir Peter Blake: why I chose Pop over pot". The Telegraph.
  4. ^ "Britain's Leading Artists Photographed by Lord Snowdon". LIFE International. 1 November 1965.
  5. ISBN 9780500971123
    .
  6. ^ Livingstone, Marco (2016). "A Partial Portrait of Leslie Waddington as Art Collector". The Leslie Waddington Collection: Part 1. Christie's, London: 152–153.
  7. ^ "Honoré Sharrer. Workers and Paintings. 1943 – MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art.
  8. ^ Barber, Lynn (17 June 2007). "Blake's progress". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 5 October 2014. Retrieved 6 October 2015.
  9. ^ Barnes, Anthony (4 February 2007). "Where's Adolf? The mystery of Sgt Pepper is solved". The Independent. London. Archived from the original on 25 May 2022. Retrieved 25 April 2013.
  10. ^ Blake, Peter (1968). "Babe Rainbow". Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 5 September 2022.
  11. New York Magazine
    . New York Media, LLC. Retrieved 5 September 2022.
  12. ^ "After 'Sgt. Pepper's': A gallery of Peter Blake's pop art album covers". DangerousMinds. 25 October 2014. Retrieved 5 September 2022.
  13. ^ "Peter Blake: Pop artist stages retrospective". the Guardian. 2 August 2003. Retrieved 5 September 2022.
  14. ^
  15. ^ "Masters Of The Canvas". Bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 24 January 2021.
  16. ^ Mike Chapple, "Pop art pioneer marks 2008", Liverpool Daily Post, 26/5/06, p3
  17. ^ King Bladud's Pigs in Bath
  18. ^ "BBC NEWS – In Pictures – In pictures: UK Supreme Court". 15 July 2009.
  19. ^ a b c Davies, Caroline (5 October 2016). "New faces on Sgt Pepper album cover for artist Peter Blake's 80th birthday". The Guardian.
  20. ^ "Sir Peter Blake's new Beatles' Sgt Pepper's album cover (with video interview)". BBC News Online. 2 April 2012. Retrieved 2 April 2012.
  21. ^ "Peter Blake: Pop Music". Archived from the original on 6 April 2012. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
  22. ^ "Llareggub: Peter Blake illustrates Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood". 2013. Retrieved 1 June 2014.
  23. The Evening Standard
    .
  24. ^ "No. 49375". The London Gazette (Supplement). 10 June 1983. p. 7.
  25. ^ "No. 56595". The London Gazette (Supplement). 15 June 2002. p. 1.
  26. ^ Publicity for 2008 Tate Liverpool retrospective Archived 12 March 2011 at the Wayback Machine, artatler website
  27. ISBN 9780500971123
    .
  28. ^ a b Higgins, Ria (30 May 2004). "Relative Values: The 1960s artist Sir Peter Blake, and his daughter Rose". The Times. Retrieved 30 January 2018.
  29. ^ "Peter Blake: A retrospective, Biography". Tate. Retrieved 30 January 2018.
  30. ^ Barber, Lynn (17 June 2007). "Blake's progress". The Guardian. Retrieved 30 January 2018.

References

  • No. 35, Vol. 9
    , edited by John L. Walters, Quantum Publishing, 2000.

External links

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