Peter Blake

At the beating heart of Swinging London, Peter Blake spearheaded British pop art with his striking blend of painting and collage, drawing on imagery from diverse sources, from music-hall to advertising. He went on to produce some of the most iconic album artwork of the last fifty years, including the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

This evening he will be discussing his sequence of enchanting watercolours, pencil portraits and etchings for Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas’s seminal “play for voices”, marking the poet’s centenary. The play has been an obsession of Blake’s for decades – he frequented Thomas’s Carmarthenshire refuge and listened to recordings in his treasure trove of a studio. These new depictions of the inhabitants of Llaregubb are distinctively infused with the vividness and ribald humour that the Welsh poet delighted in. This illustrated talk is a very rare chance to meet one of the best-loved artists of his generation, whose imagination sparked a visual revolution in popular culture.