Saturday, 24 May 2014

The World Of William Blake Paintings

By Darren Hartley


William Blake paintings rank among the most original visual arts of the Romantic era. William first studied art as boy, at the drawing academy of Henry Pars. He served a five year apprenticeship with the commercial engraver James Basire before entering the Royal Academy School as an engraver at the age of twenty-two.

The early romantic William Blake paintings, including Nature Revolves, but Man Advances, were a result of his private study of medieval and Renaissance art. William sought to emulate the example of artists such as Raphael, Michaelangelo and Durer. The objective was to produce timeless, Gothic art, infused with Christian spirituality and created with poetic genius.

The 1790s saw William take on his most ambitious work as a visual artist in a series of 12 large color prints. These William Blake paintings of iconic designs were distinguished by their massive size. Many of the print subjects function in pairs and drawn from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton and Newton.

The description given to the technique used in William Blake paintings was fresco. It is in monotype form. It used a combination of oil and tempera paints with paints. Flat surfaces, such as copperplates and millboards, were where the designs were painted on. The rareness and uniqueness of the impressions were a consummation from finishing the designs in ink and watercolours.

There were about 50 tempera paintings and more than 80 watercolors completed from 1799 to 1890. These William Blake paintings from that period were a series of Bible illustrations concentrating on Old Testament prefigurations of Christ, the life of Christ and apocalyptic subjects from the Book of Revelation.

William Blake paintings develop art on an inward-looking, imaginative trajectory. William sought his subjects in journeys of the mind. Other than the Bible, he drew on other texts, most notably Dante, in his painting of Beatrice addressing Dante from the Car, and his own fertile mind, as evidenced by his The Ghost of a Flea.




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