As part of the collaboration, Mary McCartney, a renowned photographer and frequent collaborator with Blake, took shots of the completed bottles among the settings that inspired them. Says Blake, who prefers to paint from photographs rather than sitting subjects: “If I’m commissioned to do a portrait—at the moment I’m painting Michael Eavis, who runs the Glastonbury Festival—I go with Mary, and she takes the actual pictures that I would take if I was a good photographer.”
The bucolic nature of the Macallan labels touches on themes Blake explored in his Brotherhood of Ruralists phase in the mid- to late-1970s, a period ripe for revisiting. “At the moment, I very much have the feeling that I'd like to do some straight landscapes,” he says.
The 88-year-old artist has also designed fabrics for McCartney’s sister, designer Stella McCartney, for whom he also serves as her “fairy godfather,” in his words. “It’s a bit of a joke, but we both like the idea. Although she did once say that I was a s--- godfather because I didn’t look after her.”
The Macallan teaming up again with Blake isn’t risky. In his first venture with the distillery, he designed a dozen bottles for a 1986 release of a 1926 spirit that briefly held the record as the most expensive bottle of whisky ever—before being eclipsed in the same auction. Another bottle of the Macallan, of the same vintage but from a different cask, is up for auction with Whisky Auctioneer and expected to fetch more than $1.3 million.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.