William Blake: Biography Of A Visionary Of Artistic Creation
William Blake was an artistic genius who gave birth to painting, prints, and poetry. However, he himself lived in darkness and died in poverty. The vision of his art, of that spiritual style, instantly fantastic and idealistic, was never recognized in his life. Almost without knowing it, he anticipated in his brushstrokes and in his verses the foundations of the stage of romanticism that would come shortly afterwards.
Blake is possibly one of the most unique and interesting artists in our history. It was connected to the sacred and to that peculiar biblical mysticism in which, it used to be inspired. Yet he was also that man who was haunting and often taken for a madman, because of the visions he claimed to have had since he was four years old.
Throughout his life he said he received visits from winged and demonic entities. These presences guided his style and his art to sketch a large part of his engravings, as well as many of his books. Works such as Urizen, The Book of Athanía, The Book of Los, Vala or the Four Zoas contain a prophetic style little seen so far. All this made him receive the nickname Bad Blake (Crazy Blake).
Be it madness, disease or simple creative force, William Blake is considered today as a reference in the art world. It was that misunderstood mind that saw in creation a way to reach its own divinity, to transcend beyond that material world in which it was always trapped.
Painting and letters were his particular aesthetic channel where he left the mark of his loneliness, emotions and overwhelming visionary ideals.
Early years, the young engraver with prophetic visions
William Blake was born in London in 1757. He belonged to a middle-class family, he was educated at home with his 7 siblings and at home everything revolved around two very specific dimensions: the Bible and art. Historians believe that his parents belonged to the radical religious sect known as Dissenters, something that could further mark that mystical and spiritual vision that would inspire him so much in his artistic maturity.
Despite not attending any school, William Blake always felt a great attraction for drawing. He copied works by Raphael, Michelangelo, Marten Heemskerk, and Albrecht Durer. Likewise, and with the help of his mother, he was able to explore the poetic genre to decline for the works of Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser.
He was a young man with great artistic determination, a drive so strong that it allowed him to become an apprentice engraver in 1772. That training would last 7 years , becoming an artist of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society. At the age of 21 he began working for various publishers copying the engravings of the tombs of the kings and queens in Westminster Abbey.
Later, he would complete his training as a painter after being admitted to the Design Schools of the Royal Academy of Art. Already in this first stage of his life, it was common for many of his works to start directly from the visions that he experienced since childhood. Around him and, according to Blake himself, it was common for monks, angels and also demons to appear.
William Blake, an intellectual dissident
In 1782, William Blake married the young Catherine Boucher. She was a girl from a humble class whom he taught to read and write. He also started her in the art world, trained her as a recorder to make her that companion for life and also for work.
Around this time, William and his brother Robert raised enough capital to open a printing press. This allowed them to support all dissident intellectuals of the time. Revolutionary philosophers, writers, and scientists such as Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, Henry Fuselli, and Mary Wollstonecraft (an early feminist and mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein).
William Blake was able to publish his own works such as Poetical Sketches, Songs of Innocence or Visions of the Daughters of Albion. In the latter he defended aspects as advanced as the right of women to personal fulfillment. Likewise, and also at this time, he began to innovate in his engraving technique. After one of his visions, he tried the technique of etching to illustrate books of poems, thus shaping what he called an illuminated print.
At this time, between 1775 and the French of 1789, two great revolutions took place in the world: the American and the French. All these social movements also act as a source of great inspiration for William Blake. He always advocated a freedom extolled by individualism, very much in the vein of Nietzsche.
The misunderstood and criticized art of William Blake
Arrived in 1804 William Blake begins his most ambitious work: Jerusalem. A book that illustrates and writes, at the same time that he begins to exhibit many of his works, such as Chaucer’s Pilgrims of Canterbury and Satan invoking his legions. Now all his works, both literary and artistic, only receive mockery, indifference or criticism that qualify him as the unfortunate lunatic of Blake the madman.
Starting in 1809, Blake was involved in his own ostracism. Disenchantment and the awareness that his work would never be recognized, made him increasingly separate a little more from his engravings, his brushes and his verses. Little by little, he was sinking into darkness and absolute poverty. He passed away at age 65 and was buried in Bunhill Fields Cemetery, London.
The legacy of an artist who chose to look inside
William Blake was not a nature painter like many of the British artists of his day were. He avoided direct observation because his inspiration came from within. Of that convulsed universe inhabited by prophetic visions. His gaze did not attend to sunrises, nor kinky trees, nor oceans nor abbeys as in the work of Caspar David Friedrich.
In Blake’s poetic legacy and etchings is the darkness of the inaccessible. There is that mystical force that instantly scares, worries and seems to reveal an indecipherable message. For many critics his work had something blasphemous, others guessed in his verses and in his drawings that premonitory air that would make him a key and exceptional figure in Romanticism.
