The paintings of Peter Blake

The paintings of Peter Blake.


Sir Peter Blake has had a very diverse career, embracing many styles and subjects throughout his lifetime. He has become known as ‘the godfather of British Pop Art,’ with the iconic imagery that he has produced during the 1950’s and 1960’s. His work is fundamental to the traditions of figurative realism, and collectively throughout his lifetime he has engaged with Victorian folklore and literature, illustrated children’s books and created images using a variety of media such as collage and assemblage.

From the very beginning, Blake has had a definitive style with his integration of trivia and banal objects and literature into his works. This gives his works a nostalgic feel which sets him apart from his Pop Art colleagues. This sense of nostalgia, and his attachment to his own childhood memories has remained a theme throughout his career. Grunenberg, C and Sillars, L( 2007)
On The Balcony 1955-57 Oil on canvas.


On the Balcony (1955-57) is a significant early work and still stands as one of the iconic pieces 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 in fact painted, shows a painting of a photograph of the royal family, a copy of Life magazine, a boy on the left of the composition holding Manet’s, The Balcony, and various images of paraphernalia that is so readily recognisable by the majority of people, making the painting accessible and maybe less daunting to the wider audience.
WJT Mitchell argues that, “Blakes paintings are about looking at pictures, the excitement of about how we collect them, display them, and treat them as objects.”(Mitchell, W.J.T 1994 P.35-82)

There is so much to look at in this painting; it is very much a visual diary of what was going on at that time. The flat plane of colour which I think is the lawn, appears to make the picture recede but the assortment of images which are strewn over the top, also appear to flatten the area at the same time.
The introduction of popular imagery and typography alongside the contemporary application of flat planes of bright colours was the beginnings of his interest in creating art that would appeal to the majority of people not just the art world elite.

The 1960’s is very much associated with the counter culture, the younger generation had more expendable income and freedom compared to the more austere 1950,s it was a time of youthful exuberance and excess. The media and the art world were very much a part of the era, which was increasingly becoming saturated with mass produced popular images.
Blake began to use posters and photographs as models for his paintings and assemblages portraying the pop and film stars of the era. His work still however remained very personal to him, unlike the finished, slick artworks being produced by the likes of Warhol and Richard Hamilton, his love of collecting and his attachments to anything that has been weathered and used in the past being incorporated into his work.
He also began using household gloss paint in bright colours in many of his collages and assemblages, creating works such as, Marilyn Monroe’s Dressing Room Door (1962) and Girl in a Window (1962)

The Toy Shop is an excellent example of the type of work that he was producing. He incorporated old knocked about second hand toys into this piece, which is still very much in keeping with his love of nostalgia and collecting incorporated into an original contemporary work of art. His use of everyday objects to symbolise the identity of someone (in this case himself) is something that many artists have explored and is an example of how diverse an artist he is and how he is not afraid to explore and examine new methods and media whilst still painting and producing work that was still very much about the fusing together of old and new. Osterwold, T ( 2003)

The Toy Shop, 1962 Mixed Media, Glass and Wood. Tate Gallery, London


The bringing together of both high art and popular imagery that is so intrinsic to his style is brought about by his education at art school and his working class background. In an interview with the Guardian, he states.
“I was in contact with artists who introduced me to high art and classical music, whilst my home life was very much about working class pursuits. This contact in my life paved the way for my involvement in Pop Art.”
Wroe, N (2006)

His gradual move away from the cosmopolitan art world during the seventies and a move into the countryside paved the way for a change of direction for Blake. He and a group of artists formed The Brotherhood of Ruralists, which was very much in keeping with the ideals of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood.
A quote from Blake Cited in, Grunenberg,C and Sillars,L ( 2007) pretty much sums up the manifesto

“Simply our aims are the continuation of a certain kind of English
Painting; we admire Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer, Thomas Hardy
Elgar, cricket, the English landscape, The Pre- Raphaelites, etc..........
Our aims are to paint about love, beauty, joy, sentiment and magic.” (Blake P. 1978, p.92)

He revisited literary subjects such as Alice in Wonderland which eventually culminated in his fairy paintings. But all are painted in a way that they are not so much ethereal, but real life figures that are very much in the present.

“A girl might have been a pin up in the sixties, then when I became a Ruralist in the seventies she would’ve become Titania or Ophelia.”
Lambirth A , (1997)




Titania 1976-83. Private Collection.
In an interview from the Independent (1997) Blake explains how his Titania painting developed from a photograph of the model Twiggy. Although it is not a direct portrait of her, he used her image as reference.
The fairies that are painted underneath look like they could be models whose dancing movements are hugely exaggerated, and includes an image of a fairy that looks very much like Marilyn Monroe.
So even if the subject matter could at first be considered to be traditional and even old fashioned, Blake has taken the idea and painted it in such a way that it is still very much his own style, again combining the old and new within his imagery.
Blake has gone on to create many works of art since his Ruralist days which only lasted a few years. One of his more recent exhibitions is a series of paintings entitled, “Duchamps World Tour.”
Duchamp, who paved the way for all artists claiming that anything could be considered art, if the artist chooses it. Travels the world in a tour bus meeting subjects of his previous paintings, such as Tarzan and his family. In other works he meets Elvis and the Spice Girls, has a game of chess with Tracey Emin and goes to the Congress of Unusual People. The Artists’ Fancy Dress Ball is hosted by Damien Hirst dressed as Watteau’s ‘Pierrot’ and includes Picasso dressed as Touchstone from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The American artist, Edward Hopper also makes an appearance.
Tate Liverpool (2007)
Although Blake has really not been taken seriously by the art world elite. It could be argued however that his contributions to the arts have been considerable, and his ideal to make the visual arts as accessible as Pop music, has been achieved. Despite his recently announced retirement he is still creating works of art, it’s just now he doesn’t intend on being under the watchful eye of the art world. Alkayat, Z (2010)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alkayat,Z. ( 2010) Blakes Progress . Artists and Illustrators. Dec 2010.p.14

Grunenberg, C and Sillars , L (2007) Peter Blake a Retrospective. Liverpool:
Tate Liverpool.

Lambirth, A (1997) Beatle fan who still has fairies at the bottom of his garden. The independent. Tuesday 2nd December 1997

Mitchell, W.J.T , (1994) Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Osterwold, T (2003) Pop Art .Koln: Taschen

Tate Liverpool (2007) Peter Blake A Retrospective, the National Gallery[online], Available from:
https://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/peterblake/exhibitionguide6.shtm) [accessed 20th Jan 2011]

Wroe, N (2006) The Bigger Picture. The Guardian. Saturday 21st Jan 2006.