Peter Blake: focusing on his portraits

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails

Sign up to our free breaking news emails

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

Peter Blake’s first exhibition to focus on portraiture opens in London later this month. The majority of the portraits are new or have not been exhibited before. For Blake, it is “a very personal show” and “one I have wanted to do for a long time, bringing together portraits of people I have met, and been close to, and others I have admired”. They include colourful watercolours of heavily tattooed men, created from found pictures and Blake’s imagination, including Krankie the Klown (2015), based on a Robert De Niro picture.

Others of inked women include Tattooed Woman 3 (2015) with butterflies and Tattooed Woman 4 (2015) with the names “Harry” and “William” tattooed on her chest. He also continues his series of wrestlers, which he started in 1961, including oil paintings of female wrestlers.

Older works that have not been seen before, include paintings of the fashion designer Paul Smith and Helen Mirren, who sat for Blake in the early Eighties, while starring in Cleopatra. Blake usually paints portraits from photographs – so this was a rare occurrence.

In Blake’s portraits, the most important thing, he says, “is to show a likeness both visually and also through more intimate aspects of a subject’s appearance, their stance and the objects that surround them in their home”. Working from photographs allows Blake “to pick up on minute details of their appearance and to work on the portraits for an extended period of time, which would not be possible from short sittings”.

The centre-piece of the exhibition is a three-panelled Elvis Shrine: Portraits, Landscapes or Still Lifes? that Blake has been working on for over 20 years, which features Elvis busts, portraits and memorabilia.

Peter Blake: Portraits and People is at Waddington Custot Galleries, London, W1. (waddingtoncustot.com) 24 November to 30 January