Ebony Tarzan 1972

Peter Blake made ‘Ebony Tarzan’ from an unknown medium; maybe he was trying to explore figuration through popular culture. Look at this figure emerging from the darkness. It's a tight composition, the subject filling most of the frame, the rich brown of his body highlighted against a dark indigo background. You can see the careful layering of the paint, building tone and volume. It’s a delicate construction and yet it seems so direct. I imagine Blake thinking about how to represent the male form, reducing it to color blocks in order to create an image of the body. It also makes me think of Mondrian, where blocks of color are used to represent something abstract. The dialogue between figuration and abstraction, the emotional and the rational is always present in the making of a painting.