I’m back in Bradford again having returned from our “culture rustling” raid on London. We spent a good part of this morning at the wonderful exhibition of the work of William Blake, at the Tate Gallery. It really was a tremendous experience, covering all aspects of his life and work. I was exhausted by the time we finished, but it will give me things to think about for a long time to come.
One of the great surprises of the experience was the discovery of how very small some of his work is. The reproductions I have at home, I had not realised, have been blown up to many times the original size. Discovering how tiny are the originals makes clear why this should be so, as the minute print is extremely hard to read. The other side of the coin, however, is my realisation of just how astoundingly precise was his work.
I also discovered whole areas off Blake’s work about which I previously had no knowledge at all. It was news to me, for example, that he had done a large series of illustrations for Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The enormous range of the media he attempted also came as a surprise, and together with that an enhancement of something I knew as a generalisation but had never really grasped before, and that is the boldness of his technical experimentation. What an artist!
On the negative side, however, I find that I am no nearer grasping the meaning of this arcane private symbolism, and realise that to do so would require a good deal of time and study. The uncomprehending world has often been criticised for failing to appreciate him as an artist, but he really didn’t make comprehension easy for a good part of the time!
One feature of the exhibition really grabbed my attention, and that was his use of monoprints. Regular readers of this blog might possibly remember my experiments with this method several months ago. Seeing what Blake managed to make of this technique has re-ignited by interest, and I hope to get back to wrestling with it again before very long. In fact, I would not be surprised to find my acquaintance with Blake expanding quite appreciably over the next few months.