Word: blakes
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...Blake was deeply anticlerical; to him, organized religion meant oppression--"As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys." His relation to Christian belief was both saturated in the imagery of the Bible and extremely nondoctrinal. He was trained as an engraver, not a "high" artist, which meant that a certain resentment of official art and its newly founded instrument, the Royal Academy, was built into him. Like many other such craftsmen at the time, he was possibly a Mason. Certainly he felt like an outsider...
...beautiful survey of prints and drawings by William Blake (1757-1827) on view at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art through June 24 sets before us an artist who is widely loved but, in a curious way, only narrowly known. Of course, he is the very archetype of the artist-poet: self-taught in most respects, brimming over with lyrical visions and grandiose fantasies. A childhood education that left out his exquisite Songs of Innocence and Experience would be a poor one indeed...
...there is something difficult to grasp about Blake: an obsessive personal mythology that is intensely vivid and yet hard to see as a whole. As he put it, he had to devise his own system or be enslaved by another's. Its roots are Puritan, dissenting, millenarian--and very English; Blake never traveled abroad. But English antiquity and especially English medievalism mattered enormously to him. They were the meat and milk of his imagination. Even if we didn't know that James Basire, the engraver to whom his father apprenticed him, had sent him to study and draw the monuments...
RATTED OUT Forget the mystery surrounding Robert Blake's wife. The real puzzle plaguing Los Angeles is how the official "traveling bear" logo, below left, featured on California's welcome-center signs, morphed into the unidentifiable rodent-like creature, below right, on three city signs. Caltrans, the agency in charge of the state's road signs, says it has "no idea where the graphic came from" but vows to replace them all with the good old iconic grizzly bear, at a cost of $4,000 each...
...More recently, another of Hollister's works has received public hearing. Contraries, a piece that sets poems of William Blake to music, has just been played for a second time...