PETER BLAKE

“It’s a cross I bear,” he said of the fact that his art is not taken as seriously as that of some contemporaries. “Perhaps it’s surprising that at my kind of age and with my infirmities I’m still cheerful,” he said at the Waddington Custot Galleries, where his latest show, “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” is on view. Surrounding him are works ranging from some of his earliest watercolors, executed in 1948 when he was 16, to The Family, a sculpture he completed just a few days ago. Stroking his wispy silver beard repeatedly and using a cane to walk around a central London gallery, the man dubbed the “godfather of pop art” still struggles to come to terms with his place in the world of contemporary culture. Blake concedes that he is often left having to defend his work in a world in which “serious” art is cherished above all. What is striking is how lively they are — plastic figures of Snow White and 30 dwarfs crowd outside a model of a Swiss chalet in one humorous work, and the 6-foot-long A Parade for Saul Steinberg is a model bursting with color and references to popular culture. “Painters all have a different reason to paint. It could be politics; it could be angst; it could be anger. My reason to paint is to make magic and to make cheerful things.”

LONDON — Pop music loves him. The art establishment shuns him.

At the age of 80, British artist Peter Blake is revered for his celebrated Sgt. Pepper Beatles album cover yet at the same time dismissed as too “cheerful” to be one of the greats.

-The Columbus Dispatch
 january 6 2013