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.