‘News’ Articles

Blake Around the Web, February 2012

This is the first in a series of short updates that feature links to recent stories, lectures, news, and other mentions of William Blake on the web.

• David Fallon gives a Blake lecture on Oxford University’s podcasts.
• The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts just completed an exhibition on Blake.
• Steve Silberman uses Blake’s work to investigate the phenomenon of synesthesia.
• Edward Paolozzi’s sculpture of Newton, based on Blake’s work, is currently the “View of the Week” on Bloomsbury Bytes.
• Zimbabwean actress and playright Danai Gurira discusses her influences, among them William Blake.
• The Runner gives a “vinyl dust-off” review of David Axelrod’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.
• Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch discusses his interest in Blake and Swedenbourg in relation to collaborating with film composers on his work.
• Prince Charles argues that Sir Hubert Parry, known for setting Blake’s Jerusalem to music, is one of England’s great composers.
• The Huffington Post UK features “The Garden of Love” as its Weekend Poem.
• Professor of literature Carolyn Webber, discusses how Blake helps inspire her Christian faith.

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Submissions invited for second Blake Society Tithe Grant

The Blake Society has announced its Tithe Grant for 2010.

The aim of the grant, launched last year, is to further Blake’s vision. The award for 2011 will be £609.10.

Applications are not restricted to Blake Society members, although applicants will need to provide a letter (250 words) explaining why the funding is needed and how it will be used. The only condition of acceptance is that the recipient is to provide an account of his or her project for publication in a future issue of the Blake Journal.

Applications will be accepted until July 30, 2011, and should be sent via email or post (full contact details are provided at http://www.blakesociety.org/250-projects/blake-society-tithe-grant-application-form/). In the event of a large number of applications, two references may be sought to provide information on the applicant’s perseverance and experience. The recipient will be announced in late September or early October 2011.

Tags: Blake Society
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William Blake Spring events

After the barring of Winter’s adamantine doors, the first months of Spring have seen her issue forth from her bright pavilions with a Blakean intensity, a number of Blake-inspired events having been opened or being projected for the coming weeks.

In the art world, Zoamorphosis has already covered the exhibition of Blake’s work curated by John Frame at the Huntington gallery, as well as display of his stories and sculptures, “Three Fragments of a Lost Tale”, but in the UK the National Gallery of Scotland is also planning a new catalogue, English Drawings and Watercolours 1600-1900, that will draw attention to its less-well-known collection. Due for publication in June, this will include information on the works of Blake (as well as other contemporaries such as Turner and Gainsborough) included in that collection. At the Northumbria University Gallery, in the meantime, the east London-born painter Norman Adams has opened an exhibition, The Way of the Cross, which takes inspiration for the crucifixion from a line of visionary painters that includes Stanley Spencer and William Blake.

In Australia, the 59th Blake Prize, named after the artist and dedicated to promoting diversity as well as provoke conversations that promote religious themes, has come to Melbourne for the first time in many years. The exhibition includes installation pieces, paintings and mixed-media works, nd though the exhibition has now drawn to a close it has done much to promote the work of the Blake Society in Australia.

On the stage, Blake inspired work has been attracting considerable attention. The award-winning play Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth and starring Mark Rylance has opened this week on Broadway at The Music Box Theatre, and runs to the 24th July. Directed by Ian Rickson and starring Mackenzie Crook and John Gallagher, Jr., as well as Rylance, it has already stirred up considerable critical attention with its alternative take on England’s green and pleasant land. Meanwhile, at Theatre Oobleck in Chicabo, a new play by Mickle Maher, There Is A Happiness That Morning Is, weaves Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience around the fate of a hapless pair of college teachers whose decision to have sex on the quads leads to their delivering what are very probably their last lectures.  Maher’s play runs until May 22 at the Storefront Theatre on Randolph Street.

Of other events, Heriberto Yepez will be one of the guest authors to do some readings at the UCSD New Writing Series this month. Yepez is a Mexican writer, journalist and psychotherapist, and a full-time professor at the Art School at the Autonomous University of Baja California, in Tijuana, whose work in translation include a selection of William Blake’s fragments and aphorisms. In music, Andrew Blick of Gyratory System has released an album, New Harmony, that includes the Blake-inspired track “I Must Create a System” (the album incorporating Cabaret Voltaire, free jazz and nineteenth-century socialism as well as Blake among its influences). You can buy New Harmony from Amazon.

And finally (aside from the slightly bizarre news in The Sun, much repeated, that rapper Dizzee Rascal has taken to reading Blake), one of my favourite stories of the month was the contemporary art project run in Guelph, Ontario on April 21. Song for Others was a conceptual take on Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, in which Guelph residents sang from some 60 recordings on subjects as various as nursery rhymes to children to love songs and melodies to the sick. You can read more about it on the Guelph Mercury site.

Tags: art, drama, music
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New works in the Blake Archive

The William Blake Archive has recently added a series of thirty-three of Blake’s water colour illustrations to the Bible. This series, which comprises scenes from the New Testament, supplements the series of Old Testament paintings that were included on the site in March 2010.

Most of the illustrations were painted for Thomas Butts between 1800 and 1805, although two of them – The Whore of Babylon and The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins – date from 1809 and c. 1825 respectively.

This new series means that fifty-three of Blake’s biblical illustrations are now available on the Blake Archive. Blake painted over 135 such illustrations for Thomas Butts in tempera and watercolour between 1799 and 1805, the earlier illustrations apparently being in tempera on canvas or copper before he turned to watercolour. They include some of his most famous images, such as The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun and Jacob’s Dream.

The paintings are listed on the Blake Archive under Water Color Drawings Illustrating the Bible.

Tags: Blake Archive, painting, the Bible
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Born to Endless Night: John Frame curates Blake at the Huntington Art Gallery

The Huntington Art Gallery, in San Marino, California, is currently hosting two displays that will be of interest to Blake admirers. The first, “Born to Endless Night“, is a collection of paintings, drawings and prints selected by John Frame and on display in the Works on Paper Room, March 12–June 20, 2011. The second exhibit is Frame’s own display of stories and sculpture, “Three Fragments of a Lost Tale“, showing concurrently in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery.

Frame, who was influenced by Blake and Shakespeare as a young artist, provides three dozen intricately carved sculptures for the “Three Fragments” display. Having worked as a figurative sculptor since the 1980s, Frame has also worked more recently in film and photography. His current project, on show at the Huntington, began as a dream with a cast of characters created from wood and found objects. A book accompanying the exhibition provides a linear narrative to the pieces, but Frame has also been eager to point out that each of the sculptures, ranging in size from 3½ to 32 inches high, also exist as independent objects.

For the display “Born to Endless Night: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints by William Blake Selected by John Frame”, the artist has chosen works from Blake’s illustrations to the Book of Job and Paradise Lost, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and the prints Hecate or the Night of Enitharmon’s Joy, Lot and His Daughters, and Laocoön. Of his relation to Blake, Frame writes:

Discovering Blake in my early twenties, I was drawn immediately into a world that was both charming and unsettling, and a body of work that comprised both literature—which was my primary study at the time—and visual art, where I was to find my own life’s work. Blake was a poet, a painter, an eccentric, and an unorthodox theologian. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, who confined themselves largely to portraits of the wealthy, landscapes, and decorative pieces, he grappled always with the basic questions of human life… Through imagination, he believed, you accessed the Divine; in the act of creation you realized your purpose as a human being. Blake’s insights have in many ways shaped my own approach to art making, and, no matter how frequent my journeys into his world, I have never failed to find there new wisdom, fresh beauty.

Entrance to the displays is free, and a book of Frame’s own sculptures – T hree Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame - is available at the Gallery bookstore or through University of California Press.

“Born to Endless Night: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints by William Blake Selected by John Frame” and “Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame”. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Morino, CA, March 12-June 20, 2011. For more information visit www.huntington.org.

Tags: art, sculpture
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Watercolour at Tate Britain

A new exhibition opened this week at Tate Britain, devoted to understanding what has often been considered a particularly British art form of which William Blake was a particular devotee.

Titled simply “Watercolour”, the exhibition, which runs from 16 February to 21 August 2011, looks at the often neglected impact of this medium over 800 years. Described as “the most ambitious exhibition about watercolour ever to be staged”, it covers a wide range of formats from miniatures and manuscript illustration to extensive landscape paintings that are often neglected in favour of oil.

Artists on display in “Watercolour” include JMW Turner, Paul Nash, David Jones, Anish Kapoor and Tracey Emin – as well, of course, as William Blake.  In his Descriptive Catalogue of 1809, Blake praised watercolour (which he described as fresco) in the following, typically extravagant but also subtly perceptive, terms:

Fresco Painting is properly Miniature, or Enamel Painting; every thing in Fresco is as high finished as Miniature or Enamel, although in Works larger than Life. The Art has been lost: I have recovered it. How this was done, will be told, together with the whole Process, in a Work on Art, now in the Press. The ignorant Insults of Individuals will not hinder me from doing my duty to my Art. Fresco Painting, as it is now practised, is like most other things, the contrary of what it pretends to be.

Tate Britain is also running a blog on the exhibition that will include articles by both the curators involved in the show and various other public figures such as David Attenborough and contemporary artists included in the exhibition.

“Watercolour” at Tate Britain: 16 February – 21 August 2011. Entrance fee: £12.70/£10.90 concessions. For more information visit http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/watercolour/default.shtm.

Tags: art, Tate Britain
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Everyday Blake

Everyday Blake is part of the Blake 2.0 | Digital Reading Project at readers.blake2.org and is a series of resources that focus on the use of William Blake’s art and poetry in a variety of situations. Comprising databases of citations as well as research findings on how Blake is employed online, Everyday Blake is an exciting new project that intends to explore how his work continues to find a wider audience in the twenty-first century.

The aims of the Everyday Blake initiative are to explore all possible aspects of the appearance of Blake’s work in order to examine how those works are employed in often surprising contexts, and to promote and develop the understanding of Blake’s reception beyond the creative industries and academic communities. As Blake is often a mass-media phenomenon, so Everyday Blake will explore his appearance in the mass media as well as undertake reader-research projects to provide information on the use of Blake in the twenty-first century.

The first published elements of Everyday Blake include responses on a short online survey to collect data on how and where Blake is cited online. You can see the results of that survey at readers.blake2.org/survey-results/quotation-survey-results while the survey itself is still ongoing at readers.blake2.org/current-survey. This survey has already provided valuable information on how and why people have a particular interest in using Blake as part of their everyday lives, and is to be included into a forthcoming digital ethnographic investigation into the extreme popularity of Blake on Twitter and social networking media. Some of the data collected as part of that research will be made available in the first quarter of 2011 on the Digital Reading Project.

The second component of Everyday Blake to be made available is the CitationsBase, a collection of nearly 2,000 Blake citations that appeared online over 2010 and which will be added to on a regular basis and is published as the Blake Citations Index at readers.blake2.org/quotations/citations-index. The value of this information is that it provides an insight into how Blake is commonly used by newspapers, broadcasters, magazines, media and on forums, with information also being analysed according to the category of article in which it appears and its location. The information is searchable and is intended to offer a resource to researchers in particular who wish to have some understanding of how Blake is deployed on a daily basis from New York to Delhi, on topics as diverse as politics and sport. CitationsBase is powered by BlakeBASE, a Blake 2.0 database that will build into as comprehensive as possible a resource of information about William Blake.

Forthcoming projects for 2011 include what should be the largest ever investigation into reading and viewing habits to be launched by Easter 2011, as well as additions to BlakeBASE to provide searchable resources for those seeking out Blake’s works.

Image from “William Blake Month” on The Thought Experiment.

Tags: multimedia, readers
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“In my Blakean Year”: Zoamorphosis round up for 2010

It has been nearly a year since the launch of Zoamorphosis, the Blake 2.0 blog, and with 2011 fast approaching here is a round up of Blakean events and happenings for the past year.

The year began with one of the most significant purchases to have occurred for a long time, when Tate Britain bought a series of eight etchings that had been lost until rediscovered in a train timetable. Later in the year, these etchings were central exhibits in a major display on the Romantics which was reviewed here on Zoamorphosis in October.

2010 was a busy year for the William Blake Archive, which saw publication of a new edition of Milton in February, as well as a selection of Blake’s biblical illustrations for Thomas Butts in March, two new copies of Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and the manuscript of An Island in the Moon in November.

In the first half of the year, new releases that involved Blake-inspired tributes included Jez Butterworth’s new play, Jerusalem, as well as albums by John Goodspeed, Gary Lucas and Dean Bowman. Artists whose work displays Blake’s influence included displays by Chris Ofili and 2009 Turner-Prize-winner Richard Wright, as well as Jaume Plensa, Paul Nash and an exhibition based on C. G. Jung’s Red Book. Perhaps the strangest release in February was Electronic Arts’s game Dante’s Inferno, in which players got the chance to kick all kinds of satanic butts in a Blake-inspired hell.

Patti Smith, pictured above, who played Union Chapel, London in March, attracted a lot of interest throughout the year with showings of her biopic, Dream of Life, and reviews of her autobiography, Just Kids, published in January.

Late spring saw the launch of the first Blake Society Tithe Grant, which made money available for Blake-inspired projects. During the Summer, there were two significant conferences devoted to Blake: a two-day conference on Blake, Gender and Sexuality was held at Oxford in July, while August saw the Blake in Our Time symposium at University of Toronto, with podcasts from this event being hosted on Zoamorphosis. Other shows that continued throughout the summer and into autumn included The Alchemy of Things Unknown at the Khastoo Gallery in Los Angeles and the unveiling of William Daniels’s “William Blake II” as part of the Newspeak: British Art Now exhibition organised by Maurice Saatchi.

The year ended with several more events that drew on Blake’s work, notably two further displays at Tate Britain – Richard Wright’s curated room, The Sleeping Congregation and Blake and Physiognomy. 2010 was also the 25th anniversary of the Blake Society, so the year ended with one of the most enjoyable events for a long time to be held in celebration of the artist and poet’s life and work, a birthday party that was also celebrated at Tate Britain on the anniversary of Blake’s birth.

Blake continues to be one of the most popular and respected of British artists, with this selection of events merely a selection from the year which demonstrate his continuing appeal. With a major exhibition to take place in Moscow in 2011, as well as forthcoming publications and new releases, next year should prove to be just as significant – and, of course, we shall bring you more news on Zoamorphosis as and when it happens, with reviews and articles throughout the year.

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Blake’s Birthday and 25th Anniversary of the Blake Society

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the birth of William Blake and, this year, the Blake Society is 25 years old. In celebration of both these events, a special event is being held at the Clore Gallery of Tate Britain.

The Society was founded in 1985 at St James’s Church, Picadilly to celebrate and honour Blake’s life and work and has been meeting regularly in London since 1986, with many speakers including some of the most eminent scholars working in the field. The Society aims to attract anyone with an interest in Blake and has monthly meetings usually in the City of Westminster Archives Centre in London.

The event at Tate Britain will include discussion between the surviving Chairs of the Society (David Worrall, Keri Davies, Shirley Dent, and Tim Heath), as well as musical interludes provided by Fernand Péna, Guy Pearson, and Tally Koren and two short films: Catterpillar and the Fly by Becky Adams, and Jerusalem, directed by Ryan Andrews and starring Ray Winstone. Philippa Simpson and Jason Whittaker will also provide two short talks, on the newly discovered Blake prints and the future of Blake online.

In conjunction with this event and to mark the 250th anniversary of Blake’s birth, Zoamorphosis will have a week of additional material providing reviews of new books and displays, discussions of where the future of Blake studies lies online, and the launch of a new project which will explore how everyday users interact with the work of this most popular and illuminating of artists and poets. At the end of the week, we’ll also be announcing the winner of the William Blake Jukebox Competiton, so be sure to add your suggestions before the end of the week so that they can be added to the site.

For more information on the Blake Society, visit blakesociety.org.uk.

Tags: Blake Society, Tate Britain
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Blake and Physiognomy

Tate Britain has just opened a new display on Blake and Physiognomy which is to run at the gallery until 8 May 2011.

Curated by Philippa Simpson, with items on loan from the National Portrait Gallery and drawing on the research of Sibylle Erle, Blake and Physiognomy explores the relationship between Blake and the fascination with aspects of physiognomy and phrenology that developed in the late eighteenth century.

Works on show in the display include some of Blake’s large colour prints, notably Nebuchadnezzar, as well as a selection of the illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy and other artists from the period such as William Hogarth and Sir David Wilkie who had an interest in physiognomy. The display also focuses on Blake’s interest in Johann Kaspar Lavater, the Swiss pastor and friend of Henry Fuseli whose essays on physiognomy sparked most sustained attention on the subject at the time.

Entrance to Blake and Physiognomy is free and the display is located in Room 2 at Tate Britain. It runs from 8 November 2010 to 11 May 2011.

Tags: art, Tate Britain
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