He is known as a pioneer of pop art and produced one of the most recognisable album covers in music for The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
But a new exhibition opening next week, displaying Sir Peter Blake’s lesser-known wood engravings from the 1970s alongside three new etchings, will celebrate the 82-year-old artist as a craftsman.
The exhibition will bring together wood engravings from Blake’s Side-Show series, among them Tattooed Man, Bearded Lady and Midget, made between 1974 and 1978, and currently held in collections across the UK and US. The show, which has been curated by the artist, will also feature etchings showing tattooed figures, the first time Blake has worked in the medium for over two decades.
The work will be exhibited alongside previously unseen photographs, proofs, traces and sketches of circus imagery and popular culture which Blake has kept for inspiration in his archive for the past three decades. Blake said: “This exhibition is also about the process as much as the wood engravings, it’s exposing the secrets behind the works and how they came to be.”
Blake, who learnt wood engraving as an art student, said the prints, on display in London from 27 November, were an exploration of aesthetics and society’s ideas of beauty. It was a theme, he added, that holds as much currency today as it did in the 1970s and one he had explored again in the etchings.
“These works were intended as a statement that there is no ideal beauty,” he said. “We have these idealised ideas of image but the thesis behind these etchings is to celebrate that everyone is beautiful for what they are, everyone is beautiful for their own reasons. That’s the basis behind it – if you’re unusual looking, you’re beautiful because of that, not in spite of it.”
“Throughout my life I’ve collected images of people that are different, that don’t conform to modern standards of beauty- tall people, small people, tattooed people, people who are supposedly oddities- and that’s who these wood-carvings were inspired by.”
Blake said his passion and nostalgia for the circus, side shows and interest in the bizarre and oddball characters that feature in the wood engravings stems from a lifelong interest in the “strata of society that exists on the edge”.
“Even in the lithographs from my early days at art school, one’s a fish and chip shop, and the other is two women standing in front of pictures of wrestlers and boxers,” he said. “So tThe interest has been there from the beginning till now. Just this weekend I’ve been working on watercolour pictures of tattooed people for another exhibition next year.”
Blake said he embraced the chance to challenge people’s perceptions of him as a pop artist and was hopeful the exhibition would be a surprise for his often vocal critics.
He added:“My general way of working is very diverse and always has been. And yes, I am sometimes criticised for that, for not focusing and doing too many things which apparently undervalues my work. I also acknowledge that some of my work has been slightly brash, with a pop-art style and possibly over-exposed, so this exhibition is about another side to my work. To show that I also produced works like this, that I am a craftsman. I think, in fact I hope, that there are people who will be surprised by the works.”
Blake remains a prolific artist, with upcoming projects including the concert posters for Eric Clapton’s shows at the Royal Albert Hall next year. “I don’t think you decide to retire, I think life does it to you,” he said. “Luckily my hands are still steady and my eyes are still good with glasses so until nature stops me, I don’t have any plans to slow down.”
He also admitted to experiencing a recent “a groundswell of recognition, which is really nice”. While in the past has Blake complained that he has been under appreciated by certain art institutions (in a 2012 interview he claimed that “The Tate has never taken me seriously”), the artist said that the tide had turned in his favour.
“I suppose there was time where I was being left out of things but I think that’s changed,” Blake said. “People are suddenly finding a new appreciation for my work.” Laughing, he added: “It’s almost like pre-obituaries but never mind.”
