Cardiff Local Guide A guide to all Things Cardiff
Behind the locked double doors on the first floor of National Museum Cardiff, there’s a flurry of activity taking place.
One man is balancing on top of a step ladder as he adjusts the lighting, while another is adding vinyl lettering to the dove grey-painted walls. People are voicing instructions into crackling walkie talkies and a photographer is setting up his equipment at the far end of the gallery.
Meanwhile, curator Beth McIntyre is deep in conversation with a rather familiar looking visitor, pointing out some of the framed illustrations to him.
As he takes in her words, he gently nods his head in approval.
After spending almost 30 years working on this major body of work, it seems that Sir Peter Blake is satisfied with the end result.
“I’m very pleased with it,” he tells me when he eventually takes a seat in the corner of the magnificent room which has a domed ceiling.
“It’s lovely to see it all up and working. Yes, I’m very, very pleased.”
And so he should be. The iconic pop artist’s collection is a homage to Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood.
For the best part of three decades, Sir Peter has been painstakingly illustrating chunks of the famous text and producing portraits of the play’s colourful characters – from Nogood Boyo to Rosie Probert.
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He’s also created a series of ethereal works that portray the dream sequences.
Featuring 170 pieces in total, the exhibition – Llareggub: Peter Blake illustrates Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood – opens to the public today and it is the official launch event for the Dylan Thomas centenary celebrations.
As he scans the gallery, it seems he can hardly believe that his A4-sized illustrations, which were only recently kept together in one small box, are now framed and mounted and ready for the world to see.
But despite all of the care and attention he’s lavished on them, he admits he has some concerns.
“When I was working on the collection, all I could ever see in my mind was what I had left to do,” he says.
“Now it’s gone from me, I think, ‘Could I have done more?’
“But it’s suddenly complete so it’s exciting. You can see what you’ve done rather than what you haven’t done.”
Sir Peter fitted the project around his major commissions and it never encroached on his studio time.
Instead, he worked on it from the comfort of his home during the evenings with his wife Chrissy beside him.
“It was an enormous amount of work but it was a pleasure.
“I would do it at home in the sitting room. We would have the television on and I’d just be listening to it.
“I had a routine of laying out my pencils in order and I’d be sitting in the warm so it was a nice thing to do even if it was quite difficult.
“In the past, I’ve said it was like a hobby but that makes it seem less serious.
“I almost started it like a hobby as I would sit in comfort while I worked on it and really enjoyed doing it.”
There have not been many nights during the last 27 or so years when he hasn’t been embroiled in Thomas’ rich words.
“I’ve bored Chrissy to death.
“I say she’s an Under Milk Wood widow,” he laughs, referring his wife who has accompanied him to the museum while he enjoys his first glimpse of the show.
So when did he first become aware of Under Milk Wood?
“I was a student at the Royal College of Art in 1953 and I remember hearing of Dylan Thomas’ death and then hearing a reading of Under Milk Wood,” says Sir Peter, who is renowned for being co-creator of The Beatles’ legendary Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.
“A lot of the Welsh students started doing paintings based on Under Milk Wood but it was the first time I was aware of it.”
It was three decades later when the seeds were sown for Sir Peter’s major collection.
He was approached by printer Michael Mitchell of Libanus Press – who also happened to be his dentist – and was asked to illustrate the text.
“He was a great enthusiast of Under Milk Wood and so was I. So I started to do illustrations and wood engravings.”
At the time, Sir Peter’s intention was to produce a small series of wood engravings to illustrate the play in a limited edition book but he abandoned the engravings and the book failed to materialise.
But by then he was completely absorbed by the play and began imagining the dream sequences in a series of watercolours.
“I started off painting the dream series before doing the portraits and then my quest was to draw everyone mentioned and the project got bigger and bigger,” he reveals.
Over the years, he’s listened to recordings of Under Milk Wood about 100 times – with George Martin’s recording featuring Anthony Hopkins as First Voice his favourite – and read the play about 40 times.
“I kept understanding things more,” he says of each time he returned to it.
“Phrases began to have other meanings. I’d find innuendoes and crossover references.
“What’s interesting is that I can’t quote any of it – I’ve not learned it as an actor would, I’ve just learned all about it. It’s so fascinating the way in which it’s constructed.”
When you look at the work displayed in Cardiff – which also includes an oil painting of Dylan Thomas – it’s obvious just how familiar Sir Peter is with the ‘play for voices’.
As well as the dream sequences and portraits, there are intricate pieces depicting extracts from certain scenes from Under Milk Wood and the artist has taken these literally.
For example, in one of them, he even manages to illustrate the words “whale juice” and “dandruff”.
“Once I’d decided to illustrate some text, my quest would be to reference everything mentioned in it.”
He admits, however, he was at a bit of a loss on how to illustrate dandruff.
“At the last minute I resorted to the internet and looked up the word.
“There were about 40 million references to it so I just clicked on the first one and there was an example of hair with flakes of dandruff.”
While each meticulous drawing is small in size, there is so much for the viewer to take in, with many of the pieces having a ‘collage’ or ‘layered’ effect.
And although many of the works were produced more recently, he also returned to those he started many years earlier, adding to them and making small changes.
Inscriptions from the text in Sir Peter’s tiny but beautifully-formed writing have been placed at the foot of each illustration. This no doubt took quite some time to do but it gives the work a very personal feel.
“The writing was always meant to be a part of it. It’s part of the design.”
When I tell him his writing’s a work of art in itself, he laughs, saying: “It’s very neat, yes, although there are a few mistakes!”
Chrissy is as thrilled as her husband to see the results of this long-term labour of love come to fruition but she could be forgiven for feeling a little surprised too.
She tells me how Sir Peter would travel to his studio each day on the bus with the little box containing all of his Under Milk Wood illustrations on his lap.
“I always used to think he would leave it behind on the bus,” she points out.
Her husband reveals that it was “a vague concern” to him too but luckily the items remained intact and it’s only now that they are on display can the sheer volume be appreciated with the man behind them admitting: “I didn’t realise the scale of the work until it was framed and put up.”
As well as immersing himself in the text, Sir Peter travelled to Laugharne, where Dylan Thomas lived and worked, to get more of a feel for the writer – and ended up meeting Dylan’s wife Caitlin.
“When Mike and I started talking about the project in 1985 we said that at a certain point we would need to go to Laugharne and take photographs.
“But three times we planned to go and three times we had to cancel.
“When we finally went we got to Brown’s Hotel there was a film crew there. It transpired that Caitlin had gone back to Laugharne for the first time in almost 30 years that day.
“She had written a book about life with Dylan and was doing a signing.”
Dylan’s daughter Aeronwy, who passed away four years ago, was also there and Sir Peter met up with her a number of times in later years.
He says she was “a great champion” of his project.
“Aeronwy came to my studio about 10 years ago and saw my work up until that point and she was aware of the way in which it was developing.
“I feel sad that she didn’t get to see the whole thing.”
So when did he realise the collection was finally complete?
“Twice we had the rights (to Under Milk Wood) and twice the work wasn’t ready so we lost them.
“It got to the point where it had to reach a conclusion.
“We realised the anniversaries were coming up so tied it in with that,” he says, referring to this year’s 60th anniversary of Thomas’ death and next year’s centenary of his birth.
“I wouldn’t have believed it would take so long.
“But there are paintings I’ve worked on that have taken 25 years so it’s perfectly logical.”
The final brushstroke he made to the Llareggub collection was on one of the paintings in the dream section as he “touched up” the milkman’s ear.
“I worked on the Sunday until 3am and thought, ‘You can’t go any further now’.”
Despite spending more than a quarter of his life producing it, Sir Peter says he never once got bored of the project.
“I was never sick of it.
“Sometimes I felt guilty about boring Chrissy with it as everything I learned about Under Milk Wood I would pass on to her.
“I would enjoy sitting down to read it now but I’m sure there would be something else I’d find.”
Now he’s counting down the hours to the official opening of the exhibition, which will also go on show in St Davids, Pembrokeshire, next year. He seems rather calm about the unveiling.
“The work’s not been exposed before and that’s what I’m excited about. A lot of people don’t know I’ve done it. I showed a couple of the wood engravings at the Dylan Thomas Festival in Swansea about 10 years ago but the work’s really just suddenly emerging.”
While both Sir Peter and Under Milk Wood are acclaimed in their own right, the artist admits he “doesn’t have expectations” about the response to it.
“It would be nice if there’s a good reaction, although I try not to listen to the critics.
“If someone is really excited by it, I’ll be really pleased.
“If someone’s critical of it or says it was a waste of time then I’ve moved onto other things.”
The London-based artist has plenty in the pipeline to keep him busy in the coming months, including some more Under Milk Wood watercolours which are not part of the collection, a project on people with tattoos and oil paintings of female wrestlers.
“I’ll also take some time to go back and finish things I’ve started but not completed.”
While he’s now 81, the man who is regarded as one of the country’s finest pop artists and has also produced sleeves for the Band Aid single, Do They Know It’s Christmas? and Paul Weller’s Stanley Road, is still prolific in his work.
“In principal I paint every day but there are some days when I don’t.
“I now need a knee operation,” he points out, hugging his knee to him.
“But I thank God that my eyes, while I’m wearing my glasses, are still very good and my hands are very steady. I suddenly stopped drinking about six months ago. I thought, ‘If I get blindingly drunk and fall down I would be a terrible burden.’ But I feel well.”
While he’s warm, engaging and charismatic throughout our chat, Sir Peter admits that he doesn’t like to talk too much about the 1967 Sgt Pepper album cover, which is his best known work.
He designed the sleeve with his ex-wife Jann Haworth, the American-born artist whom he married in 1963 and divorced in 1979.
The collage design has become an iconic work of pop art and much imitated over the years.
But he has since complained about the one-off fee he received for the design with no subsequent royalties.
However, he recreated the cover for his 80th birthday last year with images of friends and “great people” this time using desktop editing software rather than plywood cut-out images.
“I do get fed up about it but that’s because of the financial thing,” says Sir Peter, who has two daughters with his ex-wife. “I had very little from it – £200. I was bitter as a contract was signed that I didn’t know about and I lost the copyright on it.
“But that’s all done now. I’m bitter for five minutes but not in the long run.”
It’s his new exhibition which is now his focus. Is he pleased with the results?
“As a body of work, I’d say it’s a good endeavour,” says the artist, who has a 26-year-old illustrator daughter, Rose, with Chrissy.
“There are various paintings from my career which are important to me, such as Self Portrait With Badges which I did in 1961, but this is a key moment for sure and I’m very proud of it.”
And while he’s pleased with the work which he sees in front of him, he won’t be reading or listening to Dylan Thomas’ play in the foreseeable future as it may lead him to regret certain things.
“I know I’ll find something and think, ‘I should have definitely done that’.”
So what does he think Dylan Thomas would have made of the exhibition?
“Until the night before last I thought he’d be thrilled but then I heard an interview with (writer) John le Carré and he was saying that when he creates a character he’s then quite disturbed when the character’s portrayed by an actor as it’s often not who he imagined them to be.
“So suddenly, out of the blue, I’m thinking that maybe I have gone too far but I hope he would have liked it.”
While he has plenty of irons in the fire for the foreseeable future, it seems that Sir Peter may be looking for something which could replace his Under Milk Wood project during those evenings at home.
He recalls the morning he woke up after finally completing the epic collection.
“I woke up and said to Chrissy, ‘I think I’ll start James Joyce’s Ulysses today.’ It was a joke. And I’ve not started it yet,” he adds, flashing me a knowing smile as he picks up his walking stick and heads for the door.
Llareggub: Peter Blake illustrates Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood is at National Museum Cardiff from today until March 16 and Oriel y Parc, St Davids from May 17 to September 23. A catalogue to accompany the exhibition, Under Milk Wood, is published by Enitharmon Editions Queen Anne Press, priced £30. The programme, Under Milk Wood In Pictures: Peter Blake Does Dylan, is on BBC One Wales on Monday at 10.35pm
