Peter Blake: Drawing Under Milk Wood
Sir Peter Blake, the
father of British pop art,
is padding around the National Museum of Wales in
Cardiff, watching his latest exhibition being hung. It's a series of
170 watercolours, collages and drawings illustratingDylan Thomas's
exuberant 1953 "play for voices", Under Milk Wood.
Now
in his early 80s, Blake uses a stick, but his cufflinks defiantly display the
vivid circular image of his youthful pop-art painting The First Real
Target from
1961. He has been working sporadically on Under
Milk Wood for almost three decades. "Thomas is one
of the great eccentric poets," he explains, "and Under Milk Wood is
his master-piece." The project has become more urgent because we have just
entered the centenary of Dylan Thomas's birth and the show is the first
official event.
This methodical Englishman, with his
repertoire of rock stars, boxers and circus performers, is an unlikely but
inspired candidate to conjure the world of Thomas, Swansea's self-styled
"Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive". Dylan Thomas is often credited as the
first superstar poet, the man who took America by storm before his tragically
early death at the age of 39 in 1953.
Like
Blake's artistic response, Thomas's Under
Milk Wood was itself a project with a long
gestation period. Telling the surreal story of the lives, loves and dreams of
the inhabitants of the mythical Welsh seaside town of Llareggub (read it
backwards), it had first appeared in identifiable form as "Quite Early One
Morning", a short story for the BBC in 1944. It went through various
incarnations until its public staging in New York shortly before Thomas's
death.
That same year, Blake arrived at the Royal
College of Art and heard students from Wales discussing Thomas. Blake was born
in Kent but at the start of the second world war, he was evacuated, aged
seven, to Essex. As a result he was brought up without toys and childish
accoutrements – an experience he believes has led to his much-documented passion
for collecting knick-knacks, which then appear in his works of art. His
studio in Chiswick is an ordered cornucopia of toys, models, Victoriania,
pop memorabilia and items picked up in junk shops.
Blake
first began thinking about Under Milk Wood in
the 1970s when he tired of London and, with his then wife, Jann Haworth,
moved to a railway station made vacant by Dr Beeching's cuts, at Wellow,
near Bath. A neighbour was Michael Mitchell, a Wiltshire dentist who was
startingLibanus Press, which
specialised in fine letterpress books. A lover ofUnder Milk Wood, Mitchell convinced Blake to collaborate on
a volume of wood engravings based on Thomas's work. "At the time he
had only vaguely heard of the play," Mitchell says. "I knew he
liked to listen to something while he worked – usually Chuck Berry. So I gave
him the 1954 recording of Under Milk Wood with
Richard Burton and he loved it." Blake had already been working on
literary subjects including Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare, and was intrigued
that no other artist, apart from Swansea-born Ceri Richards,
had attempted any significant rendering of Thomas's work.
The
project was delayed when Blake's marriage broke down and he returned to London,
but received a fillip in October 1986, when he and Mitchell made a trip to
Laugharne, the Carmarthenshire town where Thomas lived during his final four
years, and which is generally regarded as the inspiration for Under Milk Wood.
By chance, Caitlin Thomas, Dylan's widow, was visiting that day with her daughter
Aeronwy. Blake, the assiduous archivist, photographed them – an image now in
the Cardiff show, alongside the train ticket he bought for his journey there –
and regarded their meeting as a good omen.
He
and Mitchell agreed on a limited edition of wood engravings based on the play,
printed on handmade papers. However Blake had other projects, and a licence
from the Dylan Thomas estate ran out. It wasn't until the late 1990s, when
Blake was flying back from Japan, that he picked up his battered copy of Under Milk Wood and,
in that bleary half-consciousness that comes with trans-continental air travel,
he suddenly saw how he could tackle the series of dream sequences that Thomas
uses to establish his characters.
He
started to do them in a thin, silvery watercolour, which he felt conveyed the
essence of a dream, but later adopted a wider palette after realising
that his own dreams were in colour. Although he initially found Thomas's
wordiness difficult to convey, he was won over by Under
Milk Wood's "craziness". For example, he could not work
out how Thomas could describe a portrait of the Reverend Eli Jenkins's mother
as "propped against a pot in a palm". "Surely he meant the
palm was in a pot?" He decided here, as elsewhere, to illustrate what
was literally written. "I was intrigued whether he meant it or not."
In the meantime, Jeff Towns, a Swansea
bookseller, learned about Blake's progress. He had worked with Libanus Press on
a limited Thomas edition, and had exhibited some early Blake woodcuts in 1995.
He invited the artist back to Swansea in 2000, by which time Blake had added
some drawings of the characters in the play. The trail went cold again until
Towns visited Blake in 2011, and found the body of work, including the dream
sequences, had more than doubled. Blake's work on the play now comes in three
distinct categories. First are the watercolour dreams – from the scene-setting
"secrets of the dreamers" being washed out over the sand under the
light of a silvery moon, through Bessie Bighead with her memories of once being
kissed by the pig-sty and never kissed again, to Owen Morgan's reverie of
"perturbation and music in Coronation Street", with "the
Women's Welfare hoofing, bloomered, in the moon". This allows a very
Blakean moment: he discovered a photograph of the Tiller Girls doing
a horse routine with hooves on their hands. This he placed on a roof and
enhanced with colour, taking delight in highlighting the dancers' hooves.
Blake deals confidently with the play's many
differing explorations of love. There is a "thinly veiled
sexuality", he says, but it's "never pornographic", whether it's
Mrs Willy Nilly's bare bottom being spanked, or Myfanwy Price's dream of her
lover Mog Edwards "tall as the town clock tower", which shows him
priapic alongside a phallic tower, based directly on the one in Laugharne.
Then there is a section where Blake
specifically illustrates the text. A map of Wales, culled from an atlas, with
Llareggub marked in for Laugharne, is followed by a sheet of black paper,
designating the "starless, bible-black" night. In telling the story,
Blake's fondness for found images and cut-outs proves ideal for the task of
conveying Thomas's long lists of detail. He cut up a 10-volume illustrated
Larousse encyclopaedia he'd bought in Bath, apparently using 32 pairs of
scissors, and his collage technique helps depict such Thomas phrases as
"slow clocks" (cue for several whirring time-pieces) or "the
boys are dreaming wicked" (two pin-ups and touches of a Wild West rodeo).
It is also useful in showing Mrs Organ Morgan's general shop with its
jumble of "custard, buckets, henna, rat-traps, shrimp-nets, sugar, stamps,
confetti, paraffin, hatchets, whistles" – all neatly assembled from
Blake's sources.
A
third part of the exhibition consists of 60 pencil drawings of the characters
in Under Milk Wood.
Once again, Blake draws widely on existing images. His First Voice – performed
by Thomas at the first New York reading, and then by Richard Burton on radio
and film – is based on Mitchell, while the Second Voice is reminiscent of
Humphrey Bogart. ("I didn't want it to be," Blake protests,
"but I couldn't get rid of him. I gave him a moustache, and he still
looked like Bogart.") Captain Cat shows the aviator Tommy Sopwith, with
the addition of a beard and a sailor's cap and Rosie Probert has the features of
Elizabeth Taylor. Other drawings are more bizarre, such as Waldo's wife, who is
based on Terry Wogan, while Mrs Utah Watkins is unmistakably Beryl Bainbridge.
Blake admits to enjoying the playful challenge he presents to viewers in
interpreting what he calls a "giant jigsaw".
The
book has now evolved from a high-end letterpress project into a
collaboration between Libanus and two commercial publishers, the poetry
specialist Enitharmon Press and the Queen Anne Press, once owned by Ian
Fleming. Together they have produced a paperback catalogue for the exhibition
at £30. For those with deeper pockets, £850 buys one of the 100 numbered
copies, bound in cloth and containing a signed original print by Blake. The
plutocratic can acquire one of 10 leather-bound copies costing £5,500 each,
signed and numbered by Blake, and including three prints.
Blake regards the project as a work in
progress. One deadline passed three months ago when he completed the Libanus
book, but he continued to add to his work and was still painting in details,
such as Mog Edwards's "eyes like blowlamps" at 3am a couple of
Sundays ago, the day before a van arrived to take everything to Cardiff.
"Time passes", as Thomas, Burton and countless other First
Voices have intoned. Blake has other commissions, such as a mural for the Royal
Albert Hall. But expect him, with his signature blend of playfulness and
sincerity, to one day return to Thomas.
