In March 2011, Blake was awarded an honorary DMus from the University of Leeds, and marked by the public unveiling of his artwork for the Boogie For Stu album. On 18 July 2011, Blake was awarded an honorary degree for Doctor of Art from Nottingham Trent University. In 2014 he was made an honorary academician at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol.

After National Service in the RAF he went on to the Royal College of Art, where his sensitive, accomplished paintings made his name. However recognition came gradually, which kept him grounded. He was born in Dartford in 1932, a humdrum town on the edge of London. His mother was a nurse, his father an electrician. He didn’t encounter any art until he left school at 14 and went to Gravesend Technical College, and then on to Gravesend School of Art. Although these works were widely panned by critics in their time, his 1983 Tate retrospective boasted record-breaking attendance—cementing him as one of the most significant living British artists. His relevance was reinforced by the relationships he soon forged with many of the Young British Artists. “My generation,” noted Tracey Emin in a talk at the Tate, “all of us, absolutely, from Damien [Hirst], Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, Mat Collishaw, we all adore Peter. And we adore his work, because Peter, right from the beginning—this is like maybe 15, 20 years ago—made an immediate connection with all of us.” Below the band are the words THE BEACH BOYS in graphic design in blue, orange, red, white, and brown. Peter Blake grew up in Kent, England in a typical blue-collar household as a son of an electrician. Although he had a younger brother and sister, he claims he was always "a solitary child" who was "extremely shy". He experienced a disruption in his education when his family was evacuated during the Second World War.Carpet Designed by Peter Blake for the British Supreme Court; Matt Brown from London, England, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons Peter Blake continues to create art today. There have been major retrospectives of his work. One was held at the Tate, in London, in 1983. Another was held at Tate Liverpool, in 2008. There are plenty of other riches, though – including three charming, abstract collages from the 1950s. These were made by pasting rectangular bits of cloth, paper and silver foil onto a board, in arrangements that recall the canvases of Mark Rothko. During the 1960s and 70s Blake taught at various institutions such as St. Martins School of Art, Harrow School of Art, Walthamstow School of Art and the Royal College of Art. A founding member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists and a constant inspiration for numerous creatives, Blake was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1981, and a CBE in 1983.

When Peter Blake left London at the end of the 1960s, he moved to the countryside and started painting in a very different style. He took inspiration from the landscape and from an old-fashioned way of life, rather than focusing on the bright colors and consumer goods of Pop art. To create this work, Blake was extensively inspired by the Victorians, and their interest in fairies and fairy tales. Like many Victorian fairy lovers, he chose to depict a moment from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, painting the fairies who attend on Queen Titania and King Oberon.

Lit: Roger Coleman, ‘The Art of Counterfeit’ in Painter & Sculptor, I, No.1, 1958, pp.22–3, repr. p.22; Robert Melville, ‘The Durable Expendables of Peter Blake’ in Motif, X, winter 1962–3, pp.18, 20, repr. p.14. A key figure in pop art, Blake has reached acclaim for his paintings, collages and prints, including the sleeve design for the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heats Club Band, alongside cover for The Who, Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas, and also the 2012 Brit Award statuette. Within Peter Blake: Collage, the artist’s work is brought to the fore and is accompanied with colourful imagery that seeks to document his influential contribution to the medium. Natalie Rudd: Your journey from childhood to art school was an eventful one, wasn’t it? You were pulled in many different directions. After this prodigious start, from the 1970s to today Blake has enjoyed regular gallery and institutional exhibitions, frequently designing posters for the shows as well as pieces for national magazines and newspapers. Blake was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1981, had residency at the National Gallery, London 1993–96 and was knighted in 2002. 2013 saw the first presentation of Blakes’s major series Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood, at National Museum Cardiff. In 2014, his 7 metre-wide montage mural Appearing at the Royal Albert Hall was unveiled and the Mersey ferry Snowdrop, commissioned by Liverpool Biennial, was launched in 2015. In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Blake designed the Evening Standard’s London Stands Together poster and in December 2020 his Thank You London was illuminated on the advertising hoarding at Piccadilly Circus and projected on the facade of the National Gallery and the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.