Regarded as one of Britain’s most famous living artists, Peter Blake (b.1932) is also a pioneer of British Pop Art and a master draughtsman who works across the mediums of paint, collage and print. In Study for 'Party' 4 (2018) we see his attention to life drawing and in what has been likened to an ‘astonishing economy of line’, through which he blends a sense of modernity and familiarity alongside the passage of time.

Study for 'Party' 4 forms part of a series made specially for his 2018 solo exhibition A Life in Drawings and Watercolours (Waddington Custot, London), Blake terms these his Party Watercolours, an array of colour and celebration depicting imaginary parties with guests dancing and laughing alongside a mass of balloons, vying for attention in a collage of chaos. Portraits of party guests are infused with the same celebratory atmosphere, the picture plane broken with falling, colourful confetti.

These are all works that are executed with a craftsman's attention to the medium. To be able to make images as beautiful as this means there can be no short cuts. Watercolour is a notoriously tricky medium yet Blake's control of it is faultless. Much contemporary art has become separated from the notion of skill and a division has grown up between the idea of fine art, with its grand intellectual pretensions, and the idea of craft which is often unthinkingly seen as being of less worth. But Blake is having none of this. The acquisition of his skills began in his student days, a time that he values immensely because it helped to refine in him that ability to express his imagination through a truly remarkable body of work, whose place in the history of art is now assured.

In the recent watercolour drawings, the portraits of the imaginary party guests have that striking and visionary intensity we have come to expect from the artist. Yet not all of the guests are imaginary for one of them is the artist's daughter Rose, wearing a red party hat. However, she is not shown as she is now - as a woman in her 30s - but as a little girl of about six or seven. It is within the artist's power to do this, to lovingly capture his subject and to render her forever young.

Examples of Blake’s work are featured in public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Arts Council Collection, London; Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; MoMA, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; Tate, London; The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon.