What Do Artists Do All Day? - Sir Peter Blake

Shown on BBC Four on 26th August 2015
Available on iplayer

Reviewed by Sandra Gibson
Photograph of the Snowdrop courtesy Tate Liverpool
Photograph of the Edmund Gardner by Geoff Edwards

This series of thirty minute programmes takes the viewer into the studios and into the lives of artists. The episode on Sir Peter Blake was part of the BBC's short season on Pop Art. At the age of 82 he was commissioned* to produce his largest work to date: Everybody Razzle Dazzle, a Pop makeover for the Mersey Ferry vessel Snowdrop. Interspersed with details of his continuing vast productivity, we follow the transformative process: from early drawings to meetings with the project curators; from working with the modifications on his computer to finally attending the launch of the resplendent ferry in April 2015. It is interesting to see his library of Pop Art images: the targets, stars, hearts, words, prices, consumer articles, Elvis, Marilyn, Doris Day, cigarette cards, letters in various fonts, cola, flags, love, rainbows … from which he will select and modify the motifs for Snowdrop.

Sir Peter Blake puts in a full day at his studio, working to a sound track of vinyl LPs. At one point he emphasises the close link between Pop Music and his art: one of his works illustrates the pop celebrities which form the content for a record which he has integrated into his composition and which one can play whilst viewing. Was Got a girl 1960-61 the first pop video? Why shouldn't there be an art equivalent of Pop Music, providing the same accessibility to all? he asks. Part of the sound background to the programme is Bill Haley's Everybody Razzle Dazzle, which links the brash cheerfulness of Pop Art and Pop Music with the practice during World War One of painting ships in black and white stripes and motifs in order to confuse the eye of the enemy gunner. The technique was not a camouflage: the dazzle ships did not blend in. They could be seen but the optical confusion created by the lines made it difficult to take accurate aim. A great deal of this dazzle painting took place in war-time Liverpool's dry docks - for example, the Canning Graving Docks where the moored pilot ship Edmund Gardner, painted by Venezuelan kinetic artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, has, since 2014, become the contemporary canvas for bright, playful colours on the Liverpool waterfront. Blake's re-design of Snowdrop echoes the painterly exuberance of the Edmund Gardner but it is not static; it is actually sailing back and forth: a working boat as well as an artwork that can be viewed from the Tate and a tribute to the war-time precursors of Op Art. Both Peter Blake and Carlos Cruz-Diez have used their creative power to subvert the original war-related purpose of dazzle painting to produce something that is accessible and fun and in harmony with the Merseyside tradition of popular culture.

I reviewed the Peter Blake episode of What Do Artists Do All Day? because of his link with Liverpool: the cover for the Sergeant Pepper album, and his recent work on Snowdrop, for example, but the whole series is worth following. It combines the intimacy of meeting the artist in their own environment with telling details of their personality and modus operandi. With Tracey Emin, it was her practice of placing models of her pictures in a facsimile of a gallery and how unsure she was with regard to the variables of lighting, order, position and height. This gave rise to her vulnerability during the hanging of her paintings at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, next to the works of her favourite artist Egon Schiele. With biographical expressionist Shani Rhys James, it was her method of looking at her paintings from a mirror held at various angles and her lonely, obsessive visits to her studio to look at her paintings in the night. With Sir Peter Blake it is the meticulous way he can cut out the most intricate images, his pleasure that the men painting Snowdrop don't have to use battleship grey and his forthright gaze at his own mortality.

*Co-commissioned by Liverpool Biennial, 14-18 NOW WWI Centenary Art Commissions and Tate Liverpool in partnership with Mersey Travel and National Museums Liverpool (Merseyside Maritime Museum), supported by Arts Council England, National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund and Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
See more at: www.catalystmedia.org.uk/reviews/dazzle_ship.php

Printer friendly page

Sorry Comments Closed