Senin, 02 Juni 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.

William's private studying of medieval and Renaissance art resulted to the early William Blake paintings. One of them was Nature Revolves, but Man Advances. Emulating his idols, Raphael, Michaelangelo and Durer, his dream was to product timeless, Gothic art that spoke of Christian spiritualism completed with a stroke of 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 technique used in William Blake paintings was described as fresco. It is form of monotype, using oil and tempera paints mixed with chalks. The designs are painted on a flat surface, that is, a copperplate or millboard and finished in ink and watercolour. This made each impression, rare and unique.

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.

The development of William Blake paintings geared towards an inward look on man's imagination. William painted on journeys that the mind took, not the body. Dante's books were another source of ideas for William, other than his own fertile mind, that proved to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration.




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