William Blake, Remote by the Sea

(laphamsquarterly.org)

86 points | by occurrence 2 days ago ago

7 comments

  • srean 2 days ago ago

    Blake's and Durer's artwork are two of my favorites.

    What I find so teasingly difficult to explain is that despite being so different there is some shared aesthetic value between them that I cannot quite pin down in words.

    Perhaps their strong geometric undertones and a certain muscularity in them.

    • hammock 2 days ago ago

      Non-“art first”, cosmological (in the religious sense), sketch-forward detail as principal expressive form… I mean one studied the other right? And the author of this piece wrote about Durer as well

    • timoteostewart 2 days ago ago

      Agree with your observation. Blake and Durer both worked in printmaking. I wonder if the processes and aesthetics there resulted in some detectable affinity between their works.

    • B1FF_PSUVM 2 days ago ago

      Toss in some Bosch for flavor.

      Those three guys could wipe the floor with most of modern art.

      (The Blake painting is tucked away in an almost-attic of the now "Tate Britain" old building in a quiet out of the way street, while the "Tate Modern" blockhouse graces the Thames south bank, mostly filled with glitzy trash. So it goes.)

      • srean a day ago ago

        Thanks for introducing me to Bosch. I immediately recognised many of his works, but the his name had not registered.

  • self-portrait 13 hours ago ago

    There is Jim Jarmusch cinema called "Dead Man."

    The protagonist is William Blake - boards a train to the town of Machine.

    The Milton prints, Songs of Innocence, plus the illustrations of the Book of Revelations were pre-Romantic steel engravings.

    I regard Blake to be this anti-positivist character in the 19th century.

    Anti-Kant, anti-Newton.

  • s5300 2 days ago ago

    [dead]