Sir Peter Blake describes the genesis of the Alice prints;
Originally there were to be a pair of books, Graham [Ovenden] was going to do Alice in Wonderland and I was going to do Through the Looking-Glass. However around this time (1969-70) there was a print crisis and the cost of printing the books became too expensive, so the book project was abandoned. What we did instead was to make the illustrations into two sets of silkscreen prints and that was their final form.
Graham Ovenden produced 8 screenprints for his Alice in Wonderland portfolio which were printed by the renowned Kelpra Studio and published in 1970 in a limited edition of 75 copies signed by the artist. In addition there were a few artist’s proofs.
In 1970 Blake and Ovenden held a joint exhibition at the Waddington Gallery, London on the theme of Alice. The Tate Gallery holds a complete set of Ovenden’s Alice in Wonderland screenprints.
Born in Hampshire in 1943, Graham Ovenden studied art at the Southampton School of Art and later the Royal College of Art where he was taught by, and collaborated with, Peter Blake. He held his first solo show in Amsterdam in 1969 and the following year the first of many subsequent one man exhibitions in London and elsewhere. In 1970 the Alice exhibition was exhibited at Waddington Galleries. In 1975 Ovenden had his solo show Lolita - drawings and prints - at Waddington, the year he co-founded, with six other artists, the Brotherhood of Ruralists. Ovenden is the co-author of a number of books on 19th century photography. His own work, both landscape and figurative, has often had a strong erotic element.
