Work
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 wholly painted, shows, among other things, a boy on the left of the composition holding Edouard Manet's The Balcony, badges and magazines. It was inspired by a painting by Honoré Sharrer depicting workers holding famous paintings.
Blake has directly referred to the work of other artists many times. Another example is The First Real Target (1961) is a standard archery target with the title written across the top as a play on the paintings of targets by Kenneth Noland and Jasper Johns.
Blake also painted several notable album sleeves. He designed the sleeve for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with his then-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 around 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 ), with no subsequent royalties. Blake also 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 had been Dury's tutor at the Royal College of Art in the mid-60s). He also designed the sleeves for Pentangle's Sweet Child and The Who's Face Dances (1981), which features portraits of the band by a number of artists.
In 1969, Blake left London to live near Bath. Blake's work changed direction featuring scenes based on English Folklore and characters from Shakespeare. In the early 1970s, he made a set of watercolours to illustrate Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass including the use of a young artist, Celia Wanless, as a model for Alice and in 1975 was a founder of the Brotherhood of Ruralists. Blake moved back to London in 1979 and his work returned to the earlier popular culture references.
In January 1992, Blake appeared on BBC2's acclaimed "Arena" Masters Of The Canvas documentary and painted the portrait of the wrestler Kendo Nagasaki.
In June 2006, as The Who returned to play Leeds University 36 years after recording their seminal Live at Leeds album there in 1970, Blake unveiled a new Live at Leeds 2 artwork to commemorate the event. Both 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 that include some of his most famous paintings. These works are homages to his earlier work on the Stanley Road album cover and Babe Rainbow prints. He also 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, Charles Manson (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 also revealed that the final cover wasn't the original one. That design 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 - as part of the successful campaign for Liverpool to become European Capital of Culture 2008, and is creating a series of prints to celebrate Liverpool's status.
In 2008, Blake painted a pig for the public art event King Bladud's Pigs In Bath in the English city of Bath.
A fan of Chelsea Football Club, Blake designed an exclusive collage to promote the team's new home kit in 2010.
He also recently 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.
As he approached his 80th birthday, he undertook a project to recreate the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover with images of friends and "great people" although this time using desktop editing software rather than the plywood cut-out images used in the set created for the original album cover.
To mark Peter Blake's 80th birthday, an exhibition will be held at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester celebrating the artist's long associations with music called (23 June to 7 October 2012).
Read more about this topic: Peter Blake (artist)
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“You haf slafed your life away in de bosses’ mills and your fadhers before you and your kids after you yet. Vat is a man to do with seventeen-fifty a week? His wife must work nights to make another ten, must vork nights and cook and wash in day an’ vatfor? So that the bosses can get rich an’ the stockholders and bondholders. It is too much... ve stood it before because ve vere not organized. Now we have union... We must all stand together for union.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence. They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. True work is the necessity of poor humanity’s earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“It is fair to assume that when women in the past have achieved even a second or third place in the ranks of genius they have shown far more native ability than men have needed to reach the same eminence. Not excused from the more general duties that constitute the cement of society, most women of talent have had but one hand free with which to work out their ideal conceptions.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)