The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I’m a great royalist, always was’
Artist Peter Blake reveals why the Queen worried he’d make her ‘Pop’ – and how he’s been trapped in ‘Under Milk Wood’ for 40 years
Peter Blake turns 90 this month, but he isn’t having a party. It would be hard to compete with his 80th, when he and several hundred friends rocked out to Madness and a Victorian street organ at the Royal Albert Hall. Besides, he tells me, from the depths of a ferociously plump sofa in his west London living room, he hasn’t been very well lately, so an afternoon at the circus seemed more sensible.
Blake, the bearded and bespectacled pioneer of pop art, adores circuses. As he does music halls, wrestling, rock stars and pin-ups, targets, Tarzan and other quaint tokens of popular culture. In his 60 years as an artist, all of them have been grist for his brightly coloured work.
He finds it “very weird” to be on the cusp of 90. “I can’t imagine how I got here so quickly. I’ve had a good career – a wonderful career – but it’s reached a sort of culmination. If I had a list of ambitions, I’ve either achieved them or I’m not going to now. And anyway, I’m not appropriate any more: to be an artist at this point, some of the worst things you could be are male, white and heterosexual, so I’m in a difficult place. Which is fine. I accept it.”
Mention his name, and Sgt Pepper almost always comes next. Blake designed the Beatles’ 1967 album cover with his first wife, the artist Jann Haworth, and nice as it is that still, wherever he goes in the world, people brandish it for him to sign, the way that this one work has eclipsed everything else he has ever done, can sometimes depress him. He referred to it recently as an albatross.
We have met at his house in leafy Chiswick, an airy and orderly chapel-like space that is, I sense, less Blake’s domain than his wife Chrissy’s. The two have been married since 1987 and have a daughter, Rose. Blake also has two daughters from his previous marriage to Haworth – Liberty and Daisy.
Every wall in eyeshot is crowded with Blake’s meticulous drawings. I’d hoped to poke about in his hallowed collection of curios – the dioramas, shells, various hats, mummified “mermaids”, signage and, most famously, elephants of all sizes and materials, that he has been steadily acquiring since adolescence – but they are restricted to the confines of his studio, a former ironmonger’s warehouse a few streets away.
“Another thing about being 90,” he says, when I ask if he has added anything particularly cool to his trove lately, “is that the point of collecting, whatever it was – the fire of it, you know – seems to have gone.” He doesn’t yet have a person or an institution in mind to donate it to. “I think that’s probably the point: we’ve got all this stuff, and what will happen to it? I didn’t want to add to the problem.”
In person, Blake is measured and deliberate, rising to moderately animated when the subject so takes him. His shirt is a faded cornflower blue and lightly frayed at the collar, but embellished with his signature red braces. His socks are thick and fluffy, bandaging uncomfortably swollen feet.
We have met to talk about a set of pictures he has made, inspired by Dylan Thomas’s 1953 “play for voices”, Under Milk Wood, which are about to be exhibited at Waddington Custot, the Mayfair gallery that has represented Blake for nearly half a century.
The little-known series – 170 watercolours, drawings and collages – is a passion project for Blake; one to which the Kent-born artist has been slowly adding for more than 40 years. “I’ve just kept on, like a dog with a bone,” he says, “I have tried to dig and dig and dig... I’m now completely trapped in it.”
For the Waddington show, Blake, who was elected to the Royal Academy in 1981 and knighted in 2002, has made nine new small paintings. Besides those, the series has only previously been exhibited in Wales, where Thomas, who was born in a suburb of Swansea and later christened himself the “Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive”, holds a status approaching patron sainthood.
His play is the weird but sublimely evocative story of an imaginary Welsh seaside town called Llareggub (try it backwards), told by two disembodied narrators who drift freely about the town and in and out of the inhabitants’ thoughts and dreams. Thomas intended it to follow the likes of Captain Cat, Gossamer Beynon and Nogood Boyo over a whole day, but when he died at 39, in November 1953, he had only got as far as dusk.
Under Milk Wood had its baptismal airing on the radio not long after, in January 1954. Richard Burton read first narrator in his soft, coal-grit weary voice and Blake remembers vividly hearing that recording, he tells me. He was at the Royal College of Art at the time, where “the Welsh students talked of little else for weeks”. He was a bit of an outlier there, having come up through technical college in Gravesend, where he principally studied graphic design. He also dressed like a Mod, when everyone else lolloped about the art rooms in corduroys and polo necks.
No matter, because success came like a rocket. A 1961 self-portrait, now in the Tate, in which Blake wears a denim suit with vast turn-ups, his top half covered in badges, won him first the prestigious John Moores painting prize, then a Leverhulme scholarship. The following year he featured in Ken Russell’s landmark 1962 documentary Pop Goes the Easel, about the hip new breed of British artist, then pootled around California for months in a gold Corvette Stingray, in a groovy update to the Grand Tour.
Blake’s Under Milk Wood series began to foment in the 1970s, when he decamped to Somerset to form the Brotherhood of Ruralists with Haworth and several other artists. Critics mostly hated the Arcadian flavour of their work, but the experiment led Blake to Michael Mitchell, a dentist with a sideline in illustrated letterpress books and wood engravings, who proposed they make something together.
“We became friends, and it was he who suggested
Under Milk Wood,” Blake tells me. He made a few drawings, but the project petered out when his marriage to Haworth ended in 1979. Mitchell, though, did not give up, and when he thought Blake was ready – around 1986 – suggested a trip to Laugharne, the Welsh town thought to have inspired Llareggub.
“Twice we made dates to go, and twice we had to cancel,” says Blake. “And it was so strange, because the third time, when we actually got there, we walked into Brown’s [hotel, where Thomas liked to drink] and there was Dylan Thomas’s wife, Caitlin, visiting Laugharne for the first time in 30 years. It was an extraordinary coincidence.”
Blake and I look through the pictures together. “These are nail cuttings,” he says, pointing to two crescent-shaped, pristine white slivers in a greyish fog. The image illustrates a part of the play about the “secrets of the dreamers”, where Thomas describes “titbits and topsyturvies... ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings... the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine”.
Blake decided early on to be very literal in his illustrations, though whale-juice, he confesses, nearly defeated him. Collage sometimes provided a good solution. He plundered particularly a Victorian-era Larousse encyclopaedia he had been saving and some old Army and Navy stores catalogues, for the purpose.
A page or two on, we meet a young man dreaming of his mother, cooking and dancing in the snow. Then a line of rainbow-coloured women with hooves for hands, followed by the town postman, modelled by Blake on Mitchell, who died a few years ago. “I took some photographs of Laugharne to use as a reference,” he explains, “and often Mike was in one corner or the other. It seemed fitting to make him a proper presence in the work.” There was a time when Blake would listen to Under Milk Wood every day. “I would put it on as soon as I came into the studio, regardless of what I was actually working on... I loved the idea of it. I loved the language and the jokes. I loved the settings.”
The deeper he got into the construction of the play, the more the cast took shape in his mind’s eye. He lit upon the idea of making portraits of them. I say portraits, but they aren’t exactly that: more freakish amalgams of imagined and well-known personalities. Here’s Humphrey Bogart wearing Richard Burton’s sweater, and the unmistakable grin of Michael Palin. Elsewhere Elizabeth Taylor appears, and even Terry Wogan, though Blake has made him female. He worked from photographs, which he much prefers to sittings – a hangover from when Helen Mirren posed for him in his early career, and he found the experience too potent to be able to paint. He only finished the picture a couple of years ago.
Blake also used photographs to paint his 2012 portrait of the Queen for a Diamond Jubilee souvenir issue of the Radio Times, though in 1969 he also came very close to a royal commission. Roy Strong, then director of the National Portrait Gallery, recommended him, “but in the end she chose [Pietro] Annigoni. I think she took one look at what I was doing and was a bit frightened I’d do her all Pop, with badges. But I wouldn’t have. I’m very fond of her.”
It’s true, Blake has all the time in the world for the Queen – “I’m a great royalist, always was” – as did his grandmother, who took him to all the victory parades at the end of the Second World War. He also went to Princess Margaret’s wedding to Antony Armstrong-Jones: “Not in the Abbey,” he says, hast
‘I think she took one look at what I was doing and was frightened I’d paint her with badges. But I wouldn’t have. I’m very fond of her’
ily. “In the crowds. I love parades.” Is he going to a street party this weekend? “There’s talk of it, yeah,” though he is worried for the Queen. “Clearly she’s been unwell, bless her heart. But she’s still here, she’s achieved it. A bit like me getting to my 90s.”
Despite the walking frame tucked behind his chair, a recent bout of anaemia and a hospital stay that gave him terrible nightmares, Blake still paints for about three to four hours every day. Does he still get the same charge from making work that he did when he was younger? “It’s the same. I love doing it. I love making illusions. Especially as a figurative painter, I love trying to make a realism. That’s what my work was always about.”
His current focus is F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a well-thumbed copy of which lies on a small inlaid table next to him, under several packets of boiled sweets. Blake first read the 1925 novel in his 20s, and has returned to it many times since. He already knows how he will draw Tom Buchanan, and Daisy. He likes the book’s surreal visuals: the gigantic painted billboard eyes of optician Dr Eckleburg on the roadside, for instance. But most of all he loves its hypnotic ending, about beating on, “boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past”.
Mind you, says Blake, “I’ll carry on working, and things will happen. That’s being 90, for me.”