Upper Harbour | Pippa Blake

Regular price $500.00

Evocative imagery from artist Pippa Blake, nomadic world traveller and conservation activist. 

  • Photograph printed on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Ultrasmooth.
  • Paper size: 480 x 610 mm
  • Image size: 405 x 540 mm
  • Comes flat-packed ready for framing. 

Meet Pippa Blake Pippa Blake was born in Portsmouth, England in 1954. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) at Camberwell College of Art, London in 1976. During the years she spent as a student Blake exhibited with the New Contemporaries and in the Stowells Trophy, R.A. Blake travelled the world extensively with her late husband Sir Peter Blake, New Zealand’s most treasured yachtsman and environmentalist, and their two children. Since Peter’s untimely death in 2001, Blake has fully re-engaged with her earlier artistic training, now painting full-time in her studio on the coast near Portsmouth. In 2005 she graduated from the Visual Arts Programme, West Dean College, Sussex with a Postgraduate Diploma (Distinction), after a long period of time away from her artistic practice.

More from Pippa

I have always felt deeply. Light and dark is integral to my work. I look to the horizon and am fascinated by what might be beyond. Ariel and Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest have played considerably on my mind: Ariel, the spirit, of the air and the spiritual and emotional; and Caliban, the earthy, of the body and reasoning. I have always identified with the dichotomies of light and dark, heart and head, reason and impulse, and order and chaos.

My work hovers in the boundaries between light and dark, between abstraction and representation, and between experience and what lies beneath in the mind. The medium is crucial: the physicality of layers of paint with scraped surfaces alongside gestural marks; photographs and film stills so it is the mechanism of the camera lens that underpins a transformation through the medium of paint. Atmosphere and ambiguity.

I have always found it much easier to make decisions in my painting than in my life. But I feel that both these things are coming together… Life’s too short is a phrase I often find myself saying to people, because I actually do realise that life is too short. Follow your dreams. Time might be running out, so go for it, and see the bigger picture. I often say, In the great scheme of life that really doesn’t matter…Get on with it and make peace. Bury the hatchet. I have seen that life can be altered in an instant. I understand that happiness is a transient state. I used to try to be perfect – but now, I’m trying to be an un-perfectionist