Sir Pete Blake

Sir Peter Blake RA (b. 1932)

Sir Peter Blake is one of the most influential figures in British Pop Art, celebrated for a career spanning painting, printmaking, collage and graphic design. Born in Dartford, Kent, in 1932, Blake studied at Gravesend School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, emerging in the 1950s and 1960s as a leading voice in a new generation of British artists.

Blake's work draws on the visual language of popular culture, bringing together imagery from advertising, music, film, comic books, typography and everyday life. His distinctive combinations of fine art and popular imagery helped define British Pop Art, while his fascination with lettering, signs and familiar cultural symbols has remained a recurring feature throughout his career.

He is perhaps most widely known for creating the celebrated cover design for the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, although his extensive body of work reaches far beyond this iconic commission. Blake was elected a Royal Academician in 1981 and was knighted in 2002 for his services to art.

In 1982, Barry Cronan Fine Art commissioned Blake's tapestry I Love You. The work was produced as a hand-knotted tapestry in India in a limited edition of 30 plus artist's proofs.

With its direct use of words as image, I Love You reflects Blake's longstanding interest in typography, popular imagery and the transformation of familiar everyday language into art. Translated into the richly tactile medium of hand-knotted tapestry, the design brings another dimension to Blake's characteristically bold and immediately accessible visual language.

The commission represents a distinctive meeting between British Pop Art and the traditional craft of hand-knotted tapestry, preserving Blake's unmistakable graphic sensibility in an entirely different medium.