Western Morning News (Saturday)
Your chance to own a Peter Blake print
Frank Ruhrmund previews a show featuring a British art icon
Although closed to visitors, as its director David Durham points out, the Porthminster Gallery, St Ives, is still open for business and sales online, and is now accepting consignments for inclusion in its sale of Modern St. Ives & British Art being held in March.
Foremost among the artists involved is Sir Peter Blake, CBE, RA. Some five or so years ago the gallery presented a popular and successful show of his prints. At the time he said something to the effect that the only time he had ever sat on a beach was in St Ives in 1969, and that even then he had kept his suit on. One with a long association with music as well as art, in 2005 he opened the Sir Peter Blake Music Gallery, located in the School of Music at the University of Leeds, and its permanent exhibition features twenty examples of his album sleeves, among them the only public signed print of his famed co-creation of the artwork for the Beatles’ album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Born in Kent, he studied at Gravesend Art School and at the Royal College of Art where he won a Leverhulme Research Award to study popular art, and one which enabled him to travel widely through Europe from Holland to Spain. Acclaimed as a pioneer of Pop Art in this country, influenced to some degree by American realist painters, at the same time as he was sitting on a beach in St Ives, he was identified with the emerging British Pop Art movement and in 1961 was part of the Young Contemporaries exhibition alongside such as David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj. In that same year he won the John Moores junior aweard for his Self Portrait Badges, and in the following year held his first solo show at the Portal Gallery, London, and was also featured in Ken Russell’s film Pop Goes the Easel screened in the Monitor series on BBC-TV.
From the covers of two of The Who’s albums to the Band Aid single Do They Know It’s Christmas, and the Live Aid concert poster, to designing the 2012 British Award statuette, not forgetting re-designing his beloved Chelsea’s kit, there’s no end to his talent. He was elected as a member of the Royal Academy in 1981, awarded a CBE in 1983, knighted in 2002, and his works now form part of public collections at Tate Gallery, London and the National Museum of Wales. Together with works by St Ives Moderns such as Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Sir Terry Frost, Ben Nicholson, Dame Barbara Hepworth, Trevor Bell, Sandra Blow, Patrick Heron and Alfred Wallis, the forthcoming exhibition by the Porthminster Gallery in St Ives already looks promising. For further information see its website.