The NEW WORK initiative was launched online earlier this year to premiere and showcase painting and sculpture by significant contemporary artists.

NEW WORK features a collection of figurative portraits in miniature; lockdown measures implemented in London this year created the space for Blake to return to these paintings in oil, which he began five years ago. Blake, fascinated since childhood by miniaturisation and an avid collector of toys, tiny curios and quirky objects, dares himself to paint these intricate, precise works as small as he can. Each painting features a portrait of an imaginary woman, close-cropped to the frame and confronting the viewer directly with an intense gaze. Overlaid images of Disney characters as ‘tattoos’ on the women, which Blake recalls have been ‘mischievously’ incorporated into the paintings, add a playful, dreamy quality to the works, which appear at once real and surreal. These motifs, like the component parts of the faces themselves, are found emblems, taken from Blake’s vast bank of collected images.