I’m not going to post a picture of that Blake copy just yet. I’m ashamed of it on a visceral level. I’ve been drawing and painting long enough that I should be able to knock a copy out in a matter of days. Not this one. I wasn’t even striving for a replica, but it just has a superabundance of wrong.
I keep telling myself it’s because Blake must have had syphilis raging in his visual cortex, and I should have just traced the damn thing out with a projector to save the effort of trying to think like a man who regularly spoke with dead family members (and fleas, and bunny rabbits).
I don’t even talk to the ones who are alive.
I still like it, though, and once I figure out how to make it photogenic, I’ll post it along with the rationale for its companion study pieces, one of which is with this sorry, thin creature:
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
October 1, 2012 at 7:41 pm
Minnie
Oh, my! Considering Blake’s prickly nature I can’t say whether he’d approve, but I avow that the spirit is there. That is much more desired than a line by line copy.
Don’t we all have something or another raging in our noggins.
October 1, 2012 at 8:19 pm
coozledad
I always wonder what kind of crazy Blake was. It’s not schizophrenia: there seems to be an element of ‘willing” his visions. Wordsworth said he was mad, but didn’t offer any details besides the qualifier “obviously”.
Maybe he had some developmental disorder that harmed his ability to interact socially.
Some of his epic poems strike me as good natured babbling, but the tastes of his era are admittedly beyond my comprehension.
I’m preparing to steal a bunch of his (and his pupil Samuel Palmer’s) conventions to graft on to a large painting I’ve been flailing at for about a year. I’m hoping they will help me make it fit the late eighteenth century feel of the room I plotted it out for.
October 2, 2012 at 11:44 am
Minnie
“Willing” of visions. Hmm. Self-hypnosis can produce visions. Maybe Blake was unusually willing to go where his unconscious took him. You know from your work that doing visual arts heightens visual acuity, opens paths leading to surprising connections, and encourages intuition. Add that to tapping into the Akashic records, Jungian archetypes, or whatever other phrase would tidy up such exploration, plus sensitivity to social and other changes going on in his lifetime, and you might end up with a Blake.
A developmental disorder certainly could explain some of his difficulties.
Anymore I don’t have the stamina for epic anything and agree that much literature from Blake’s era is at least a century beyond my ken. I will eternally be in thrall, though, to “The Tyger”. When I was very young, my father often read it to me in the evenings. The imagery and mysticism got me and still holds on.
Now I have to go bone up on Samuel Palmer to be ready for your large painting.
Oh, your horse looks like he could use a bag of oats.