As Sir Peter Blake is announced as the John Moores Painting Prize’s first patron, he tells Laura Davis what it was like to win the competition back in 1961

TO AN expert eye, the apparently unfinished sections of Peter Blake’s youthful self-portrait may appear symbolic.

But there’s no big secret behind the work’s incompleteness – it looks unfinished simply because it is.

Blake was still frantically painting it as a van arrived to take the piece to Liverpool for exhibition.

“There’s a curious phenomenon to it, in that whole areas of it just didn’t get finished in the time,” reveals the artist, who created it specifically for entry into the Walker Art Gallery’s John Moores Painting Prize.

“I more or less finished one Converse shoe, and rather than the other one being completely unfinished there’s this curious section through it – a narrow strip of painting.

“I did that more or less at the last minute to indicate where the shoe was.”

Then the van arrived and Self-Portrait With Badges was tied to its roof, the oil paint still wet.

Founded five years earlier, the John Moores Painting Prize was still a new competition, but it was drawing the attention of a whole generation of young artists.

Blake’s contemporaries – among them the 1967 winner David Hockney – were all keen to take advantage of the £1,000 cheque and the prestige that came with being a John Moores winner.

He entered three times – rejected altogether in 1957, a finalist in 1959 – before winning the now defunct Junior Section for artists aged under 35 in 1961.

Blake was awarded £250, a huge sum for a struggling artist at the time. He gave it to his father to help him start an electrical business.