About my work

The early years

George Blair started making photomontages using photographs culled from the Sunday colour supplements in the early 1970s.    His first picture to be exhibited was “Silver Jubilee” in Art for Society, Whitechapel Gallery, 1978 to be followed by a first solo exhibition in 1980, which the Guardian described as “excellent”.

Surrealism is a major influence.  Dali’s golden youth morphing into a narcissus and the sinister cannibals gorging each other (a metaphor for the Spanish Civil War) in the Tate were favourites.  Magritte’s subversive view of the bourgeois world is another artistic passion.  There were powerful resonances of his work in Benson and Hedges advertising campaigns in the late 1970s, which featured Duffy’s photography.

Postcards

George moved on to designing postcards in the early 1980s. Some were aimed at the London tourist market showing sites such as Tower Bridge, Nelson’s Column and St Paul’s suitably doctored. Others were political.  The record high unemployment of the Thatcher Government was the subject of four postcards.  The best seller sold about a quarter of million.  It shows Greetings From Britain on the front and is a parody of the seaside postcard, but instead of the pier are five job centres in areas of high unemployment.  Another design, “Daddy What Did You Do When There Were Jobs?” parodied the famous First World War poster.  Margaret Thatcher’s iron control of her cabinet was a subject of two further postcards.  A row of Thatchers disappearing into the horizon is captioned “My Cabinet is Completely Behind Me”.  Images diminishing ad infinitum also occur in “Opportunity Knocks”, a series of seemingly endless doors finishing with a brick wall. This image was inspired by Orson Welles’s film of Kafka’s Trial with the accused man waiting in growing desperation at the door wanting to be let in only to be told to keep on waiting.  Infinite regress was also used in his first card “The Handout” which is of a hand coming out of a pillar box holding a card of a hand coming out of a pillar box repeated a couple more times. 

George’s last card in this series was produced in 1986.  His new, NHS day job meant working very long hours.  Friends tried very hard to get him to go back to my creative work, but the time did not seem right.  When 2010 came around it did and he went back to designing postcards. 

The challenge in designing postcards is how to win the battle of attraction against fifty or so others in a rack?  This, and the small size, places a premium on clarity, simplicity and a graphic quality.  The striking juxtapositions are a real advantage, what surrealists have called “the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”[1].

The 1980s were Pre-Photoshop.  It was an era of cutting and pasting photographs with scalpels, scissors and cow gum glue, with lighter fuel used to lift off photographs to reposition them.  One of the tricks of the trade to make the image look realistic was to remove the white ghosting effect around the edges by painting them black.  From 2010 it was time to catch up with the Photoshop, which has its own cantankerous personality.  

Having always earned his living outside art, George could please himself artistically. This is just as well, as his Photoshop teacher despairing of his idiosyncratic interpretation of briefs and his boy racer desire to push effects to the limit, commented, “There’s always one”.

Postcard Exhibitions

His postcards have been exhibited in:

1983   Postcard Views, Chapter Arts Cardiff

1985   Christmas Card Exhibition, Metro Arts, Bury

1986   Artist Christmas Cards, York Arts Centre

1987   State of the Nation Postcard show, Herbert Gallery, Coventry

2012   Glad Tidings of Struggle and Strife: A History of Protest Christmas Cards, Newport Art Gallery

2014   The Postcard is a Public Work of Art, X Marks the Bokshop, London

Postcard Publications

• “Wish You Were Here” Greetings from Britain Lund, Brian (1985) Postcard Collecting. Nottingham: Reflection of a Bygone Age; Poverty (1987) London: Child Poverty Action Group“
• Daddy What You Do When You Were Jobs” Malavieille, Michele and Tripodi, Serge (1988) Open Access, Paris: Hatier
• “The Handout” was used as a front cover for Reid, Ian (1992) Narrative Exchanges, New York: Routledge
• “Rock Classics” was used a token cover by HMV
• "Axe Tax Havens" was published in the catalogue of the Postcard is a Public Work of Art

Would you like to know more about my work?

Contact

Tel: +44 (0)20 8883 0385

       +44 (0) 7768 19 38 59

George Blair's Mind's Eye

george.blair.uk@gmail.com

Martin Parr Foundation has included images in their archive.

Florence Nightingale £50 is in the permanent collections of:

The British Museum

The Asholeom Museum

The Fitzwilliam Museum

The Bank of England Museum