One of the leading proponents of the Pop Art movement in the 1950s and 60s, Sir Peter Blake talks to Jaydon Martin ahead of an exhibition launch in Swansea.
Best-known for his collage-like work and straddling the line between Pop Art and fine art, Sir Peter Blake remains a cornerstone of postwar British art. For this writer, collage brings to mind dreams, half-fragmented ideas, snatching into the dark.
“Collage lends itself to storytelling as a medium in a way that’s quite separate from painting or drawing,” Blake says. “The series I’m working on at the moment is called Joseph Cornell’s Holiday and it’s about the artist Joseph Cornell, who’d never visited Europe but loved Europe. So I’m able to travel him all through Europe in the collage, and take him to the places he never went. It’s very much a way of storytelling; you might start one story and find something that leads you onto another path.”
Blake’s first experience of collage was in the Royal College Of Art, where a roommate’s girlfriend introduced him to Kurt Schwitters. The German-born Schwitters, who died in 1948, was one of the big progenitors of collage as an artform in the early 20th century.
“Schwitters would make collages literally by the stuff he’d pick up, maybe on a walk. He’d pick up a bus ticket, a bit of wood and a bit of old paper and make beautiful art from that. That would’ve been about 1955 and I’ve made collage since then.”
Born in 1932, Blake is still working regularly to this day, at the age of 86. Growing up in wartime London, he had first-hand experience of the Blitz, and that environment had a great effect on his later art.
“When the Second World War was declared, my sister and I were evacuated the next day. Someone on our street knew somebody who lived in Essex who was willing to take us as evacuees. I was there for a couple of years. Oddly enough I was always in London when the action happened: I was in London for the Blitz, for the Battle of Britain, and back in London for D-day, so things would quieten down, you’d come home, and then it would heat up again and you’d be sent off.
“When the war finished in ‘45 I got the opportunity to go junior art school and went to Gravesend School Of Art at the age of 13. I think that in the work I’ve done, there’s often been a nostalgia for something that was taken away. That bit in childhood didn’t really exist in terms of old toys, books, food, stuff like that. That probably affected my later life, and a lot of the painting I’ve done has possibly been nostalgic for that – the pictures of children or of childhood certainly came out of that.”
Not many can claim to go to art school at just 13. How much of an eye-opener, or even a Pandora’s Box, was that for Blake? “It was absolutely amazing, as you can imagine. I stopped being a child, and then went to art school and became a young adult, and from then on you were an artist. So it was an enormous gift really, and I think my generation were incredibly appreciative of what we were offered.”
His journey into the art world, though, was not immediate from that point. “I wanted to go towards fine art but I was advised to be a commercial artist, so I did a first year of the commercial art course national diploma, then applied to the royal college as a graphic designer, and was accepted as a painter by Robin Darwin, who was the principal then. I put one painting in and he liked it, and then accepted me into painting school.
“I started at the Royal College in ‘53, having never been a painting student. I’d always been a graphics student, so I think that’s the reason I often use lettering in my art, and the reason I continue to do applied art. I’ve always been a mixture of graphic art with fine art. It’s been good for me in some ways, but bad in others, in that I’m sometimes not taken as seriously as a painter as I might’ve been.”
Blake’s work resonated with the counterculture due to its rebellious energy, but he has maintained a profile in the years since that’s kept him working. What’s been the secret to that?
“I think one thing was that I never got too rich and famous in the way that, say, Andy Warhol did, or certain artists now – so I never reached the heights from which I then dropped. I kind of hovered along in the middle in terms of fame. And I think continuing to work, keep the standard up and keep work interesting meant I stayed there, and with old age a certain fame comes. I’m working well, which I’m thankful for.”
Musicians, notably, have been drawn to Blake’s work; most famously, he designed the cover for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “Most bands [back then] had somebody who went to art school: The Beatles had John Lennon, The Who had Pete Townshend. I think Pop Art appealed to the bands at that time and they used the motifs of Pop Art throughout their imagery.
“The Who’s managers [Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp] called them a Pop Art group, and they went through a lot of books on Pop Art and used things like the RAF roundel target. It was directly from certain band members being at art school and the way I was working at the time that appealed to them.”
Around the same time of Sgt. Pepper’s 1967 release, Blake taught future new wave hitmaker Ian Dury. “He was a ruffian! It was at Walthamstow. A very tough arts school but they happened to be brilliant students, and at the time there was a very good teaching style. I taught there, William Green taught there; a lot of young teachers who weren’t that much older than the students kind of befriended them, I guess, and helped them out.
“Ian and I became close friends. In later life, when I would get quite a lot of job offers, if I couldn’t do them I’d pass them on to Ian. A whole bunch of things he did for the Sunday Times were offered to me and I passed them on.”
The work he’s exhibiting at Swansea’s Glynn Vivian Art Gallery includes a collection of illustrations and paintings inspired by Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. Blake first came across Thomas when Under Milk Wood was read on the radio in the early 1950s; much later, the possibility of illustrating a book came about, which ended up taking 28 years to complete. Dylan Thomas’ centenary year in 2014 provided the impetus to finish the illustrations, now showing in the great writer’s birth town.
It’s almost certainly harder now to become a professional artist than it was in Blake’s early years, so what advice does he have for young artists?
“Learn to draw. If you’re at arts school and you’re not being taught to draw, find a teacher who will teach you to draw. Along with using computers and modern technology, which are now an essential part of the art world, drawing is still incredibly important. And then, I suppose, work hard. Apply yourself and work hard, and with luck, that’s how things will work out.”
Sir Peter Blake: Collages And Illustrations, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, Sat 8 Dec-Sun 27 Jan. Admission: free. Info: www.swansea.gov.uk/glynnvivian