We thought is was high time we took a closer look at this interesting series of Pop Art prints.
The latest editions in the ‘found art’ series are: Winston, 24 Flags, Vera Puzzle and Playmates, all amazing large scale limited editions and a real must for Peter Blake fans. We also have some earlier prints in the series which are now close to selling out. These include the cigarette packets Phillip Morris, Laurens and Nazionali all stunning silkscreen with silver leaf, and Three Match Boxes which has areas of spot varnish used to pick out and enhance parts of this stunning print.
The Found Art 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”.
