'Found Art: Playmates' - A signed, original limited edition digital print by Sir Peter Blake, published by CCA Galleries. Blake has chosen the cover of an obscure children's magazine from...
'Found Art: Playmates' - A signed, original limited edition digital print by Sir Peter Blake, published by CCA Galleries.
Blake has chosen the cover of an obscure children's magazine from the 1940s, which highlights his recurrent theme of childhood and innocence, as well as his love of the circus.
Sir Peter Blake adds to his ‘found art’ series 'Winston', '24 Flags', 'Vera Puzzle' and 'Playmates'. The series is based upon one of the earliest tenets of pop art: that everyday objects can become the subject matter for fine art (imagine Warhol’s soup cans etc. ). However, Blake does not choose dominant commercial brands to focus upon; his interest is ‘found art’ meaning found objects that most people would consider to be valueless eg. old cigarette packets, the packaging of old children’s games, match boxes etc. This fascination with arcane and unusual objects is of course at the centre of his collecting instinct; his studio is famed for being closer to a museum of popular culture objects and printed ephemera than a typical artist’s studio.
Blake wants us to see these objects in a new way; to see them as art. An interest in ‘outsider’ and commercial art has always been integral to Blake’s work. Enlarging these objects allows us to appreciate the beauty of their design, their fragility and their textural quality. To achieve this level of detail Blake uses the latest digital technology - enabling him to blow an object up to 50 times its normal size, allowing us to view it from a completely new perspective and top see every frayed fibre/surface feature. As Blake explains, “There are literally millions of things that if you can scan them and make them 50 times bigger, they’re beautiful because of the technology. You are touching the object, so the scanner is seeing things that the human eye can’t see. The bigger you take it, the clearer it becomes. So something like a flag, each thread appears, and then on each thread, threads appear from that, so it’s almost infinity”.
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