Retrospective work has been absorbing me recently and follows on from my last post when I watched a South Bank show made in 1996 about Sir Peter Blake as he looked back on his life as an artist at that time. It prompted me to review my own output over a long period and return to my sketchbooks used in the last 20 years. Peter Blake was one of the first Pop artists, before Warhol, Lichtenstein and many of the others. From the start of his career in the 1950s and 60s he painted the major influences in his life from popular culture such as film stars, musicians, and wrestlers; he also used magazine extracts, posters and objects from everyday life building up an enormous eclectic collection reflecting everything that interested him and the photograph below shows a small sections of these items.
Peter Blake’s relationship with Ian Dury in particular has always intrigued me and their friendship and mutual admiration was a creative catalyst. Blake was Ian Dury’s tutor at art college and the musician was a very accomplished artist himself before he took up songwriting and performing. Blake painted Ian Dury several times and Dury wrote two songs about the artist. Here are two examples of their work:-
Unfortunately I was unable to see Sir Peter Blake’s retrospectives at the Tate in 1983 and Tate Liverpool in 2008 but I have seen some of his works at Waddington’s Gallery in London, particularly his latest ones. In Ian Dury’s case, however I went to see:
Ian Dury’s Peter the Painter has been recorded “…..“It’s not a fake, it’s Peter Blake, it’s navy blue, it’ crimson lake, it takes the cake and no mistake for goodness sake take a look at those Blakes” .
I’m currently trying to paint a tribute to both artists which is mainly in oils but I have been thinking of completing it with a collage element but cannot quite see how to achieve this without infringing copyright in their artwork although I’m wondering at this point whether all the images in Blakes collages were cleared with the original photographers in the case of the Sergeant Pepper album and many of the other works using photographs.