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Peter Blake Quotes (1932-)
Artist
About Peter Blake
Sir Peter Thomas Blake (born 25 June 1932) is an English pop artist. His best known work is the image on the cover of The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He has since complained he was only paid Β£200 for this. He used images from comics, magizines, consumers goods, and other images to create colorful paintings.
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βPeople think Sgt Pepper is part of my name.β
βPeople say, "Why do you paint?" and I say, to make magic.β
βAlbum covers are like any other vehicle, they are a means of illustrating a story.β
βI believe in fairies. Although I can't prove they exist, nobody has ever managed to prove to me that they don't.β
βHe opened the door that so many of us went through, the door of possibility, by saying anything an artist makes is art.β
βMost artists go potty as they get older: dafter and madder as they get more celibate. So I am consciously going to do that.β
βIn one work Marcel Duchamp meets Tracey Emin in the desert, with three camp cowboys. In another he meets Elvis and the Spice Girls.β
βArt in Britain is in a very healthy state. The artists of my generation and older are at their best — people like Howard Hodgkin and Frank Auerbach. The YBAs are still very strong, and it's exciting to wonder what the next generation will bring.β
βMy dealer was a friend of the Beatles and the Stones, and he suggested they used a fine artist. I talked to the Beatles at length about what the cover would be. I worked out it would show the moment after they had played in a bandstand in the park. My big contribution was the life-size cutouts, the magic crowds."β
βI canβt work with computers but I work with someone who can. We talk about what the subjects will be and then I get a load of images about Liverpool. We then scan them and put them on a disk and then we manipulate them on the computer. I am treating them as posters. They are prints but I want them to look like posters.β
βI don't think artists should be sponsored. You should not rely on grants. You either make a success of your art or you donβt. I worked as an artist for a number of years without making much money β I have never had any financial backing in that way. Things are now very good for me but for a lot of the time things were not.β
βBrian Sewell is a fool. For some years he seemed to have it in for me and Hockney and [R.B.] Kitaj. Even if he wasn't writing about us he'd always find a way of bringing us in. He'd say, "so and so was a bad artist but not as bad as Hockney, Kitaj or Blake." Things like that.β
βI say to people I'm in my late period. Obviously, as you get older you're in your late period anyway, but to decide you are becomes a concept. It's related to the concept of my retirement, which was about the fact that I'd shown at the greatest gallery in the world and I'd never top that... So, I retired from the jealousy of other artists, and ambition. I could alternatively have become a Buddhist or something — it is a kind of beatific state.β
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Peter Blake on Egalitarianism
βIn our egalitarian democracy, we have achieved the ultimate in making certain that all men are created equal: we have just about empowered a branch of the government, the Federal Housing Administration, to specify the size and shape of the typical American master bedroom (in which all Americans are thus created equal); to specify the size and β¦ to specify the width, length, straightness or curvature, surface, presence or absence of trees, sidewalks, telephone poles, etc, etc, of most suburban streets (on which all American youngsters play equal) β at their considerable peril.β
About Peter Blake
Sir Peter Thomas Blake (born 25 June 1932) is an English pop artist. His best known work is the image on the cover of The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He has since complained he was only paid Β£200 for this. He used images from comics, magizines, consumers goods, and other images to create colorful paintings.