Blakeology

To see a world in a grain of sand
and a heaven in a wild flower
to hold the universe in the palm of your hand
and a heaven in a wild flower

What is he talking about? He is talking about TRANSCENDENCE.

The ability to transform our banal ugly everyday lives into something profound & magical.

This is something we are all capable of, requiring only the power of the imagination.

What would Blake think of this essay?

If Blake were alive today and talking with me he would probably call me an idiot. There are two reasons that I make this supposition.
One is that Blake stated plainly: "To generalize is to be an idiot." I tend to have a fondness for sweeping generalizations, but Blake believed in concrete interpretations to his bold metaphoric gestures.

The other reason is that Blake was an extremely argumentative individual. In social company he could often be charming, the life of the party at the modest tea-time gatherings he frequented early in his career, where he would entertain guests with the impromtu singing of his own verse as well as diverting speculations and lively debate, noted for a teasing ironic sense of humour and an eagerness to leap to the contrary view of any topic discussed.
But he did indeed have a sharp temper and his career is punctured by an eventual series of bitter falling out episodes with most of his former friends and patrons.

What was Blake really like?
He looked kinda like Elmer Fudd: Short with a huge round head, snub nose, and bulging eyes... but unlike Fudd, he had a square jaw, a broad chest and a strong cockney accent instead of a lisp. In spite of what Henry Higgins of 'My Fair Lady' might lead us to believe about the lower-class implications of cockney speech, many of the greatest writers in English literature spoke with that distinctive London lilt, including John Keats, Percy B. Shelley and Alexander Pope.

What was England like when Blake grew up?

England 250 years ago seems to me to be a place that doesn't really seem all that alien from the kind of place we live in today, a so-called modern society charictarized by social confusion and rapidly changing technologies. True, they didn't have television... but they did have frequent public executions, which to me seem to have provided much the same element of vivid mindless diversion. They didn't have the internet, but literacy was rising and the new medium of print journalism was starting to become pervasive. The generation before Blake would have grown up in an environment where every single object in use would have been crafted by hand, but Blake's generation saw the rise of mass-production and the industrial revolution which changed all that. His lifetime saw the erection of massive ugly factories spewing cthonic torrents of toxic smoke into the air. And what was all this concentrated enterprise dedicated to?

WAR!

England and France had been at war on and off for more or less the last 1000 years. In Blake's lifetime England was a virtual armed camp of constant military activity as this war grew to the fevered pitch leading up to the climax of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815. The result of England's victory was massive unemployment, riots and general mayhem resulting from social problems left ignored by years of the distraction of warfare.

What did Blake think of all this?
He was disgusted, obviously, but unlike the poets Byron & Shelley, Blake was not the sort of person who took it upon himself to attempt to effect a personal political change in a hopeless corrupt world. Blake was detached from this world, an artist who functioned outside of society, and his creative vision often described a spirit of rebellion and a reaction against society, one which he did not manifest in overt action. This would have been a distraction from his real life's work, the depiction of his mythic alternate realities.

Blakeology:

What was Blake's family like?
Blake was born in 1757 into what we might describe as a solid hard-working lower-middle-class environment. His father John Blake was a tradesman with a small hoisery shop in downtown London. Accounts of Blake's childhood do not depict any particular cruelty in his upbringing but the natural force and temper of Bill's personality must surely have caused a terribly stressful relationship with his father, a presumption we make based upon the persistent themes of inter-generational conflict recurring throughout his work. But for the record, even if they didn't get along very well his father did make his contribution to art history by indulging in Bill's thirst for art at an early age, purchasing several knock-off print copies of Classic Italian works by Michelangelo and Raphael, an influence which is the elemental model for Blake's visual style.
Within his immediate family Bill lavished attention upon his younger brother Robert Blake, a sweet gentle boy whom Bill idealized as an angelic model. As so often tragically happens the good die young, though Bill was consoled by supernatural afterlife visitations and angelic conversations with his sibling after his death.
Bill only had a few years of school, and we presume that learning to read was all he really needed to know as he was a voracious reader. He briefly attended drawing lessons at the Royal Academy of Art, but as an individual whose complete creative vision appeared virtually intact from the egg he was often impatient with the methods and aims of his instructors.

Bill was apprenticed to the engraver Robert Basile and learned the honest but creative trade of printmaking. After serving his term he established his own modest business as an independant commercial engraver, supplying bookmakers and journalists with commissioned designs and copies of the works of other artists, a career which enabled him to maintain a modest lifestyle and put bread on the table while allowing himself the time to pursue his visionary projects throughout most of his life. In this career we see an artist attempt to weave a self-confident but sometimes precarious path avoiding the traditional pitfalls of satisfying the whims and constraints of royal or public patronage on one hand, or debilitating penury on the other.
In his early twenties Bill married Catherine Bower, an illiterate peasant girl. He taught her to read, and also taught her drawing and printmaking, and she eventually took such an active part in the production of his work that one might be tempted to interpret much of his product as a form of collaboration. Catherine Blake possessed a calm, patient attitude which must have couched a massive strength to put up with her husband's volatile personality. Blake often credited his wife's placid willpower as the force which made his expression possible.

Blake never found wide public acceptance for his work in his lifetime but he did attract a small select audience of artists, writers and patrons who took an interest in his efforts. The only famous artist he was intimate with was the Swiss painter Henri Fuseli, a flambouyant sharp-tempered midget whose eccentricity was a perfect match for Blake's, and who said: "He was the only man I ever met who didn't make me puke". Fuseli's twisted nightmarish style was an inspiration to the surrealists a century later, and reproductions of his work adorn Jungian psychology textbooks to this day.

Blake lived and worked in central London for most of his lifetime, with the exception of a few years in the middle of his career when a patron offered him the use of a rural cottage in the village of Felpham in Sussex. This provided Blake with a tranquil pastoral retreat from frantic urban life in order to concentrate on producing serious art, and while Blake certainly was prolific on this extended holiday it could be noted that Blake was always prolific anyway.
However, Blake eventually tired of country life and was planning on returning to the city when a chance incident disrupted his move. One fine day Blake found a trespassing soldier drunkenly pissing in his garden and roughly threw him out, and the soldier then accused Blake of uttering "Death to the King" and had him charged with sedition, seriously, a hanging offence! Ironically, while Blake would indeed have felt the sort of sentiments he was charged with, he habitually practiced discretion about openly expressing such political views in public. After various delays and a great deal of stress and worry Blake was finally tried in court and declared innocent by the magistrate, who found the accusing soldier a disreputable witness, and who also possibly wished to downplay the broad spectre of spurious charges involving death sentences, reassuring his apprehensive neighbours and keeping the peace in the villiage. Blake returned to London shaken, from now on even more contemptuous of authority but more paranoid and suspicious of politics as well.

Throughout his career Blake's primary media for artistic expression was the production of hand-printed books of poetry and illustration, customized with hand-tinted watercolours. When Blake returned to London he made a last desperate attempt to find a wider audience for his work by staging a public exhibition of a selection of some of his larger more ambitious paintings. This exhibiton was destined to failure, receiving dismal attendance and virtually no sales. He also experienced difficulty re-establishing the clientele for his engraving business, which suffered as he more frequently neglected contracts and deadlines while concentrating on his personal projects. In frustration he lashed out at his few remaining friends and patrons, who for the most part began to quietly avoid him. Reduced to poverty he was eventually forced to begin selling off what was left of his meager possessions to survive.

Old age slowly tempered Blake's arrogance and he gradually began to display a more contemplative manner. One interesting aspect of his final years was that he was adopted as a venerable mascot by a handful of young medeavalist artists and poets who called themselves the 'Ancients', and he savoured the respect and admiration they treated him with in his final years. One thing which remained unchanged throughout his entire life was the persistence of his work habits, for he wrote and drew virtually every day of his life up until the final one in 1827 when he peacefully joined the angels he had regularly conversed with.



BlakeArt

Blake's drawing style: I state without hesitation that Bill Blake was possibly the most bold and daring renderer of the human figure known to us, the only obvious rival in the depth of his dazzling gymnastic portrayal of the human body being that decadent Viennese artist Egon Schiele a century later.
That which makes Blake's figures interesting is the incredible risks he takes. He is not constrained by the limitations of anatomical accuracy, his figures often contorted and splayed past the limits of that which the body is capable, then captured from unexpected points of view. His sheer boldness so often led him into error in the obvious distortion of what the human form constitutes, but these mistakes are merely the indicators of the stunning victories he so often achieves when he depicts a figure which tricks us into thinking that it might be rendered wrongly, but upon close examination reveals a deceptively captured balance and perfection. These moments of revelation are among the sweetest magic of art as we know it.

Blake rarely (well, virtually never) worked from live models. His youthful art training, aside from copying whatever designs were commisioned for him in his engraving career, primarily consisted of simply copying the books of prints copied from his heroes, the Italian Renaissance masters MichealAngelo and Raphael. So virtually all of his later compositions consisted of extrapolations of human form conceived and executed purely within his brain. This fact makes for an interesting contradiction, the suggestion that not utilizing modelling and preplanning allowed him the latitude to take the genre to the boundaries of human expression. Of course, the limitations of this approach are evident in the awkward and sometimes amusing manner in which he portrayed mythic beasts. As well, we are more than aware that the boldness of Blake's style was certainly not appreciated by many of his contemporaries.
Like Michelangelo, Blake often chose to depict the human body as well-muscled, naked or well-defined, and in flight: rising, falling, or levitating, suspended in turbulent skies...
Although I have no direct evidence to support this claim, it is my belief that the work of Blake in some profound way has either overtly or intuitively influenced Stan Lee and the evolution of Super-Hero Comic-Art.


Blake's printing techniques:
In his day job and career as an engraver and printer Blake was confident using a variety of engraving and etching techniques, and he experimented freely combining and innovating various styles of reproduction. He invented and introduced some interesting ideas in the use of acid etching and wax grounds in the printing process.
For his personal projects he combined images and texts on the same panel, inscribing all of the text for all of his major works in reverse. Reverse writing has been suggested as elemental of paranoia or Da Vinci-esque left-handedness, though in Blake's case it may just be evident of the simplest path to the effective production of his manuscripts. His books were usually tinted by hand with watercolour paints after printing, with extreme differences in the selection of colours used in individual editions. Many of his books were even more radically customized by the substitution of various plates throughout his career, as he kept many of his printing plates with him in his studios and felt free to respond to interest in his work by printing up any individual small run of an edition whenever the situation allowed.
Blake also produced large paintings on canvas or board which were unfortunately harder for him to sell. He used his own innovative techniques of mixing pigments in tempera bases, which he loosely and perhaps erroneously described as a 'fresco' style (in theory this should refer to a plaster-based mural technique). The Penguin Dictionary of Art dismisses Blake's pigment experiments as failures which produced artifacts that often deteriorated and are hard to preserve, but then the writers might be grumpy art-restorers, as they seem to say this about virtually everyone, even Blake's hated arch-rival, the commercially successful and influential president of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds.


Blake's Poetry:

I take the liberty of skipping over discussing the academic mechanics of Blake's writing style, a subject better dealt with by more knowledgable English Lit majors. I will mention that anyone interested in exploring in more technical detail Blake's poetic themes and imagery is directed towards the definitive document on this subject, Northrop Frye's 'A Fearful Symmetry'.

I will comment briefly on a couple of points:
1) Blake tended to resist his contemporary's movement towards solidifying the structure of English grammer, and freely relied upon loose and at times ungrammatic, yet natural and comprehensible phrasing.
2) The strong biblical rhythm of his verse almost always lends itself to song. Blake remains one of the most purely sing-able great poets.

Was Blake a Romanticist?

English Literature textbooks very frequently categorize Blake as precursor to the English Romantic Movement in Poetry... In my personal opinion I do not agree with this classification, although there is reasonable evidence to support this view depending upon one's interpretation.
First, it depends on whether we wish to define the word 'Romanticist' loosely or specifically:
In a very broad sense the word 'Romanticist' would describe an individual whose approach to life functions on an emotional, intuitive, subjective level, rather than an intellectual, rationalist, objective level. This would apply to Blake.
In a relatively broad sense the word 'Romanticist' would apply to an artist embodying a Dionysian rather than an Apollonian temperment; This places the word in the context of a duality where it opposes the word 'Classicist': The Romantic implies an innovative break with tradition and an emphasis on the individual, narcisstic ego, while the Classic implies a conservative approach which reaffirms previous historical styles. In painting these labels seemed to have fit most effectively when comparing two French artists, E. Delacroix (R) and J.L. David (C), although with most artists such labels do not fall into place so deftly. Blake's work certainly displayed extraordinary innovations, yet his style was still rooted in the traditional biblical archetypes he departed from, so this question can be argued as a matter of taste.

In a specific sense regarding English Literature the word 'Romantic' strictly applied to five poets who were all born during Blake's lifetime: Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Samuel Cooleridge, and John Keats.
Would I say that Blake was a direct influence on these gentlemen? Not really, for they all pursued their own individual styles, defined by a striving for self-expression which broke away from the religious biblical spirit which embued Blake's style. None of these poets made a particular point of citing Blake as an inspiration, although Cooleridge had met Blake and expressed an appreciation of his poetic talents, despite dismissing his drawing as distasteful.
My associate Mr.Thomas Hendry of the Toronto School of Art has suggested that the real distinction between Blake and the Romantic Poet Gang was that they used divergent aims to achieve convergent ultimate realizations: the method of the Romantics was the glorification of the ego as an approach to transcendence, while Blake pursued a pure spiritual transcendence whose effect was an empowerment of the ego in the face of the sublime.

As a modest digression I would like to draw the attention of anyone interested in the Romantic Poets to ponder for a brief moment one of the great incidents in English Literature: the meeting of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron in exile by the shores of Lake Geneva. Discussions of the supernatural as well as the new phenomenon of the galvanomic action of electricity inspired Shelley's young wife Mary (the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft) to write that pioneering work of science-fiction/horror 'Frankenstein'. Ken Russel's movie depicting this meeting, 'Gothic', borrowed its trippy visual motifs from the work of Blake's friend, the proto-surrealist painter Fuseli. However, while Russel's movie tended at times to degenerate into an inarticulate phantsmagoria, I might suggest as an obscure alternative a probably somewhat harder to find film released at around the same time: 'Haunted Summer' (Eric Stolz, Laura Dern) captures the sense of 'poetry' (specifically: the literal inspiration and composition of words) as well as the Shelley/Byron interplay/rivalry much better than Russel's film. But to his credit Russel had previously created among many other interesting projects an effective docudrama about the life of Wordsworth. I could also note that I have never personally seen a truly powerful documentary or docudrama about Blake, although perhaps one might exist.

Well, who did Blake influence?
He died virtually unknown, and in the generation after his death his reputation began creeping forward with a study by the Victorian scholar Matthew Gilchrist, a book which was timidly apologetic in tone but succeeded in stimulating some interest in his work. The individualistic visionary elements in his style perhaps found more fertile ground in the bold new continent of America, and it has been suggested that Walt Whitman was sympathetic to some of his themes. Blake's influence is most deeply evident in the 20th century poetry of Alan Ginsberg. Aficionados of Beatnik literature might be familiar with the story that Ginsberg was inspired to seriously pursue poetry as a vocation after a supernatural incident where he experienced an auditory 'vision' of Blake reading his poem 'The Sick Rose'. Ginsberg's most famous piece 'Howl' echoes with pounding Blakean rhythms and rapturous Blakean imagery.

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