This work is a portrait study for Peter Blake’s Party Watercolours made in 2018, specially for the exhibition Peter Blake: A Life in Drawings and Watercolours at Waddington Custot in London. The Party Watercolours show various groupings of children with party hats on in a dancehall or backstreet setting. Surrounded by confetti, balloons and dancing couples, some of the children pull funny faces, laughinglycover their ears at the loud music or look calmly out towards the viewer with a precocious indifference. A distinguished draughtsman, Blake began drawing as a young boy at Dartford West Central, Kent, and was encouraged to pursue art at Gravesend School of Art.Blake’s reputation as a formidable watercolourist can be seen in ‘Late Period – Study for ‘Party’ 8’, which was painted at the age of 85 years old.

Blake has always been drawn to painting portraits, of the friends and family that populate his life, as well as commissioned portraits of Britain’s rich and famous – double portraits of Lord and Lady Palumbo, Leslie and Clodagh Waddington; musician friends Ian Drury, Eric Clapton; and even Her Majesty the Queen (2002, 2012). ‘It’s about getting a likeness,’ he says simply, ‘You hope you’ll get something more than you would from a photograph, but not much more. I want them to be good, but they’re not necessarily great art.’ The brilliance of Blake’s portraits lies in his ability to capturethe extraordinary in the ordinary, treating the common place object or anonymous partygoer with love and affection. Blake frequently uses photographs to appropriate imagery into his work; ‘Late Period – Studyfor ‘Party’ 8’ is a fictional portrait of a character whose facial features are a composite, assembled by Blakelike one of his collages.

The term ‘Late Period’, which appears in the title of this series of work, is a tongue-in-cheek descriptionused by Blake to review his own career. Upon turning 70 years old, Blake announced the beginning of his ‘Late Period’ (a term usually used by critics of a painter’s oeuvre after the artist has died), in order to give himself free rein to ‘go a bit crazy’. ‘It’s a time when an artist can do almost anything they want. It doesn’t have to relate to the earlier work if you don’t want it to and it is a wonderful feeling of freedom. Usually other people decide when your Late Period is or was, but rather than wait for anyone else, I’ve decidedvery consciously to have mine now.’

This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity signed by the artist and dated 20 August2018.