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 Édouard Manet's The Balcony , badges and magazines. It was inspired by a painting by 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 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with his wife Jann Haworth, the American-born artist whom he married in 1963 and divorced in 1979. The Sgt. Pepper's sleeve has become an iconic work of pop art, much imitated and Blake's best-known work. Producing the collage necessitated the construction of a set with cut-out photographs and objects, such as flowers, centred on a drum (sold in auction in 2008) with the title of the album. Blake has subsequently complained about the one-off fee he received for the design (£200 [8] [9] ), with no subsequent royalties. Blake made sleeves for the Band Aid single, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" (1984), Paul Weller's Stanley Road (1995) and the Ian Dury tribute album 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 Eric Clapton's 1991 million-selling 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 Oasis greatest hits album Stop the Clocks . According to Blake, he chose all of the objects in the picture at random, but the sleeves of Sgt. Pepper's and Definitely Maybe were in the back of his mind. He claims, "It's using the mystery of Definitely Maybe and running away with it." Familiar cultural icons which can be seen on the cover include Dorothy from Wizard of Oz , Michael Caine (replacing the original image of Marilyn Monroe, which could not be used for legal reasons) and the seven dwarfs from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . Blake revealed that the final cover wasn't the original which featured an image of the shop 'Granny Takes a Trip' on the 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 Sgt. Pepper album cover with images of 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 Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to celebrate the artist's long associations with music called Peter Blake and Pop Music (23 June to 7 October 2012). [21] In 2014, he exhibited his illustrations inspired by Under Milk Wood at National Museum Cardiff. [22] In 2016, Blake designed the artwork for Eric Clapton's studio album I Still Do .
In March 2020, Blake's poster London Stands Together was distributed in every copy of London's Evening Standard newspaper. [23]
