Former Salt Lake Derby Girl Has Solo Art Show

Former Salt Lake Derby Girl Has Solo Art Show

Artist Liberty Blake is multi-talented. She has a solo collage show opening at Phillips Gallery today, Friday, March 20. In addition, she is art content manager and resident artist at the Leonardo Museum downtown. She also skates and bikes for fun after playing roller derby for Salt City Derby Girls and then starting her own recreational derby league, the Red Rockettes.

Her parents,  Jann Haworth and Sir Peter Blake, are both very well-known artists and together created the cover art for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band album in 1967. Liberty was born the year after, and says she is fortunate in that she grew up surrounded by creative people. “I come from a fusion of cultures, I grew up in England, the product of a Californian mother and English father. Both artists, they came from dramatically different backgrounds. My mother spent her formative years surrounded by the glamour of 1950’s Hollywood. My Dad, having been evacuated from London as a child during the Second World War, started art school when he was just 13. My parents divorced when I was eleven and I adapted to a new life with two very different homes, one a rambling farmhouse in the countryside and the other in a privileged area of West London. It’s these clashes of circumstance that have had the greatest influence on my work.

“I always had opportunities to be creative, in all different ways, traditional and non-traditional… I grew up in England during the 70’s and 80’s. We didn’t have a TV and obviously computers weren’t around, so I spent most of my time exploring, playing and making things. I did traditional art like painting and drawing and making things from clay, but I also built stuff outside, tiny houses for fairies and various child size houses for myself from all kinds of odds and ends. I also went to an amazing arts-based school, called The Looking Glass School, from age 8 to 13, that my mum Jann Haworth started. It was a tiny school of about 13 kids, it prioritized art, creativity and self expression. It was a very significant factor in enabling me to become who I am today.”

She says she wanted to be an artist when she was very young. “But I also wanted to be a ballerina in Swan Lake and a full-time roller-skater with an action-man scar… not much has changed, I’m just a bit taller!” she said. She added that being from a family of artists fuels her passion. “You can’t help but be inspired by seeing art around you all the time,” she said. “My parents, and step-parents, made art, collected art, taught art, and took us to openings and galleries a lot. I was very, very fortunate to be immersed in that kind of environment as a child and it forms the foundation to my creative life now, in both my art and my work at The Leonardo, where I’m involved with the museum’s art content.”

Blake says that for her, art fulfills the need to create; that she has to make things and be creatively challenged at work and in her personal life to be truly fulfilled. She says that though her background is in painting, she has been working with collage for the last few years, and that will be the direction she is going for this show. “I love the feel of paper, it has a warmth that paint doesn’t quite have,” she said. “The work is abstract, trapezoid chunks of paper that tessellate together. The shapes are often purposefully awkward and uncomfortable, wedged together as if they are holding each other up, or precariously balanced, layered and worn through. Creating tension and balance is essential, the size and placement of every piece of paper is carefully considered. Color relationships, relative scale, and texture, all come into play. My work is abstract, but the story behind each piece is personal and distinct; a place, friend, poem, landscape, object, or collection. These images play in my head as I work and they are what I see when I look at a piece.”

She says she hopes her collages evoke an emotional response, that they trigger thoughts and memories, and that they create a sanctuary for the eye. When asked to name her favorite pieces of art, she says she loves all the paintings of Mark Rothko. Also,”The Henri Matisse ‘Blue Nude’ collages and ‘Small Dancer on Red Background’ which she had the privilege of seeing last year in London at the ‘Cut-Outs’ show,” she said.” I actually did a collage about that, it’s in the show. Its called ‘Self Portrait on Red Background- After H.M.’ My Dad did a painting called ‘On the Balcony’ when he was a student at The Royal College in London, I absolutely love that painting. I love both of my parents’ work. Sorry, that’s more than three!”

And as for the future, she says she wants to just to keep making art, perhaps start painting again. She says she thinks doing some mixed media pieces with paint and paper would be satisfying.

Hadley Rampton, fine art consultant at Phillips Gallery, said the gallery was  attracted to her work due to her sophisticated sense of composition and design, “Not to mention an evolved restraint,” Rampton said. “We love her complex color combinations. Her pieces have a glow about them. I am very pleased to report that one of the pieces has already sold! We are confident that it will be the first of many.”

For more on the show go to: http://www.pgcurrentshow.com/albums/liberty-blake/