Night garden Sussex I, 2024
Pippa Blake was born in Portsmouth, England in 1954, and studied Fine Art (Painting) at Camberwell College of Art, London from 1972 to 1976 gaining BA Honours (First Class). In 2005 she graduated from the Visual Arts Programme, West Dean College, Sussex with a Postgraduate Diploma (Distinction).
Blake has travelled the world extensively but now lives and works on Chichester Harbour near the Hampshire/Sussex border, UK . She exhibits frequently both in the UK and New Zealand. She serves as a founding Trustee for BLAKE an organisation in New Zealand inspiring environmental leadership.
In 2015 & 2016 Blake worked as artist in residence at Chichester Festival Theatre during two productions - culminating in four exhibitions of the work produced - including the Garden Gallery at Pallant House in Chichester, West Sussex UK.
Working in oils and using photographs and film stills as her starting point, Pippa Blake's paintings are imbued with soulfulness, and the moments captured in them feel unstable or unfixed, as though the viewer is witnessing the scene from a peripheral viewpoint. The paintings describe uncanny scenes that are at once familiar but so fleeting that they remain just out of reach. The poignancy that comes from this detached perspective evokes feelings that give the work its power and potency. Pippa Blake makes atmospheric paintings about moving through the landscape; the fleeting glimpses this reveals and the emotional journeys it triggers.