Journey Woman

Pippa Blake, widow of Sir Peter Blake, was recently in Auckland to exhibit her work at the Louis Vuitton store, timed to coincide with the Louis Vuitton Trophy Series. Nicole Stock met with both Pippa and Mark Browne from Louis Vuitton to discuss the exhibition Pippa Blake: Journey.

Trish Clark has curated the Journey exhibition at Auckland’s Louis Vuitton store, using pieces from a series of works painted over the past five years.

Though most well-known in this part of the world as the wife of sailor Sir Peter Blake, since his tragic and untimely death, Blake has made a name for herself in the art world.

Her connection to the fine arts is not a new hobby, in the 1970s, Blake received a Batchelor of Fine Art in Painting with First Class Honours from the Camberwell School of Art. With her recent reconnection with painting, she has pushed herself further into fine arts study completing post-graduate studies, earning Distinction, from West Dean College, in England.

The title of the exhibition Pippa Blake: Journey, comes both from her personal journey to reengage with this creative side of herself, as well as the physical journeys that are illustrated in her work.
Pippa Blake: Journey, was on at the Louis Vuitton store in Auckland in March, a partner event to the Louis Vuitton Trophy Auckland sailing event.

URBIS: Your work is particularly atmospheric; is a sense of place more important than any specific setting?
PIPPABLAKE: All my work is triggered off by something, say for example these, the road paintings. They purely came out of me trying not to paint green landscapes and searching for a way, a voice away from the green landscapes, so actually at the time I was travelling backwards and forwards from the studio. It was actually when I was doing my postgraduate year and at night I was taking lots and lots of colour images as I was driving. I do that a lot. Slightly dangerous. Camera, one hand on the wheel. How good the photograph is doesn’t interest me at all and out of those came these night road paintings. That to me was the sort of mystery of that thing where you’re driving along at night and you have the headlights coming around the corner and [wonder] what is it round the corner. So it’s sort of like what’s there.

If someone didn’t know they were called Night Road paintings or hadn’t heard your explanation, people, well, New Zealanders in particular, might assume they’re sea scenes. Is it difficult for people, again New Zealanders in particular, to separate you and your work from the work of your late husband, Sir Peter Blake?
My work hasn’t been seen out here so much. I had it exhibited about 10 years ago, had a couple of shows, but my work has changed a lot since then, and in fact I don’t paint about the sea. It’s just that I did this one residency on a ship and a lot of work to do with the sea came out of it, and I had another show years ago which I combined with a photographer and again that became specific to do with the sea. But it’s more a sort of universal sea, not about a particular sea voyage. So in that respect, it’s not really related. What it is related to is the fact that, yeah, we were married for 23 years, I did a huge amount of sailing in that time but also I grew up by the sea so I’ve always had the sea in my blood. But I’m happy for people to interpret them. They’re for the viewer to observe and their imagination to take over.

I suppose that’s the beauty of abstract work rather than very pictorial work.
 Yeah.

Mark, it must be quite exciting for you to be able to bring Pippa over and show her work to New Zealanders who haven’t had the chance to see it for 10 years. Why was this significant for Louis Vuitton?
MARKBROWNE: Louis Vuitton has had a very, very long association with the Blake family, going back to America’s Cup days and also even in more recent years Pippa has been a close friend of the brand. We were very aware of the work that Pippa has been doing in the world of art and we felt that with the various connections over the years, and in more recent years, that it
was appropriate to talk to Pippa about exhibiting here again because it’s been 10 years since Pippa exhibited here last. We are running this event on the harbour, the Louis Vuitton Trophy series and we felt that there was a nice connect with Pippa’s work and what she’s doing today with the brand. Louis Vuitton and art have a very strong association – we have exhibited a number of artists’ work in our stores around the world.

There’s also a connection between Louis Vuitton and the new extension to the Maritime Museum?
Yes, we played quite a small part in that to be honest. There were a number of parties that were very keen to see a permanent exhibit for Sir Peter Blake and we worked [together with other parties] to build this fund-raising effort to get to a point where a permanent exhibit could be realised. It had been spoken about for a long time and now we have it as part of the Maritime Museum and it’s called Blue Water Black Magic – A Tribute to Sir Peter Blake.

So going back to your work, Pippa, when I was looking at some of them originally on the computer screen, they initially reminded me of Turner’s work. Was there inspiration from him, or other artists’ work?
The tornado painting actually came out of me doing another residency in West Sussex in Petworth, which is actually where Turner had a studio and had worked in that area. It was a two-month residency working in a barn. I did look at Turner a lot for this particular project so it’s interesting that you mention that.
When I was getting into drawing and painting when I was at school when I was 16, we had an amazing art teacher and we looked at Cézanne and Monet and Matisse. They were the people that I really sort of looked at a huge amount, not impressionists but more the post impressionists. Then when I was at art school in London in the early ’70s, abstract expressionism was the way, sort of. To me that’s what really influenced and inspired, so people like Willem de Kooning and Rothko to a certain extent, but more de Kooning and Gorky.

Sir Peter had such an interest and a dedication in educating people about the environment. Your paintings seem to have a raw energy and to me, at least, a hint of possible destruction perhaps. Am I just reading too much into them or is there a similar interest in environmentalism?
I think I’d have to separate it from what Peter did, well except just the fact I’ve travelled with him. I’ve done a huge amount of travelling and I love, I do love the sea, and I love geographical phenomena. I don’t want to see the world destroyed. And actually some of the works on show are from an apocalyptic series of paintings but they more developed from me taking lots of images of fireworks but also at the same time I watched Apocalypse Now, and I also love the First World War poets like Wilfred Owen, so there’s something to do with destruction in that.

It’s interesting that you just made an easy connection between images and poetry. It has been written that you do use a lot of prose and poetry to inform your work and yet throughout, as we’ve just been discussing, your inspiration seems very visual. Does the inspiration for different works come in different ways?
Apocalypse Now was based very much on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Heart of Darkness was based on TS Eliot’s The Wasteland so there are links, but on the main I would say I’ve always loved English literature and I read a lot. I just think it’s more one’s life experience that goes into the work and it’s really hard to pinpoint exactly what it is or how or why. When you’re painting, it’s you.

www.pippablake.com