'Found Art: England Forever' - A signed, limited edition digital print with silkscreen glazes by Sir Peter Blake.

Sir
Peter Blake continues his ‘found art’ series with two new editions:
'Britannia' and 'England Forever'. The 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
fl.ag, each thread appears, and then on each thread, threads appear from
that, so it’s almost infinity”.