Egg and Spoon

By Rose Blake

 In Egg and Spoon, the artist and illustrator Rose Blake tells the story of a childhood fuelled on art and creativity, infused with travel and steeled by the more quotidian aspects of family life growing up with the artist Peter Blake. Surrounded by a cast of originals and eccentrics and taking in backdrops such as London, L.A. and Paris, Blake creates poetic snapshots of a family, with the joys of a life dedicated to art and the inevitable fragilities and poignancy of age and, pertinently, ill health. The effect is that of a literary photo album, with all the charm and character and emotional intensity those documents communicate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rough Trade Books
• Release date: Jun 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781914236204

Rose Blake

Rose Blake was born in London in 1987. She studied at Kingston University and the Royal College of Art, and now works as a freelance illustrator in London. Although she has illustrated many books, this is her first time writing one.

Book preview

He works in a glass room built onto the back of our Victorian house in London. A life sized waxwork of Sonny Liston stands outside the studio door, dressed in a threadbare silk gown, feet planted strongly to the ground, arms folded.

‘My guardian angel,’

he says.

Inside it smells of turps and oil paint. For me it’s the smell of childhood. Tiny brushes are neatly lined up on squares of soft white cotton, cut from his shirts that are too worn-out to keep wearing. Bright colours are squeezed onto a paper palette; small squidges of Vermillion, Raw Umber, Cerulean Blue, Burnt Sienna. Toys sit in orderly rows on the window ledge.

When I am older he will let me sharpen every pencil with a mechanical sharpener until my fingers are blackened with lead, and we’ll draw pictures of the circus together.

He often talks about ‘catching the light’. His working day is entirely dictated by the path of the sun and at dusk he is forced to put down his brushes.

This evening Mum walks straight past the waxwork, holding me in one arm, and taps out a pattern on the studio door with the other. He opens it, grinning. He’s just put a new record on the turntable and there’s a loud, warm crackling sound coming from the speaker, Goodnight Tonight by Wings. He sits back down at his