Casper David Friedrich: Sea at sunrise
William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge is a wonderful exhibition, so good that I had to spend two days in Cambridge, so that I could go back and look twice. The quality and range of the images is extraordinary and it is not just Blake's work that you need to see. For instance there are images by Casper David Friedrich, that reminded me that it is possible to create landscapes that glow with mystic spirituality, such as 'Sea at sunrise', images that need to be seen in the flesh if you really want to get an idea of their intensity. The issue about 'Sea at sunrise' being that the image is stripped down to almost nothing, except the play of light as it vibrates through the air and dances on water. Light of course in Friedrich's case, being a metaphor for the constant presence of God, but for myself a reminder that the Sun is the shaper of all life on Earth, and that life originated in the sun energy charged chemical soup that we call the sea.
I was also fascinated by the diagrammatic work of Jakob Böhme. Some of the plates illustrating his ideas were printed onto layers, so that flaps could be lifted and you could see underneath.
The Third Table
As soon as I began researching Böhme, I found a theosophical hermetic illustration of the fiery soul. The soul is, according to Böhme, in 'its natural condition' when burning. When the heart is represented upside down, it is immersed in the fire of anger. However, through the sacrament of baptism, the soul receives the fire of love and anger is transformed into love. I was very interested in this, as I'm working on how to visualise emotions, and it seems to me that they can migrate, and as they do, I begin to see affinities between them, anger being very close to love, the one often being triggered by feelings instigated by the other. His diagrams reminded me that we haven't really moved on that much further since then, an article from the Dark Energy Institute about how the Quantum of the Void compares to the Quantum of the Physical Universe, when diagrammed, would I suspect look very like one of Böhme's ideas. The fiery soul
As well as being introduced to some things I hadn't come across before, perhaps it was the 'intensity' of people's visions that I was most impressed with in this exhibition, all of the works and artists represented, managed to communicate a total commitment to some sort of psychic command of visual language. Blake is of course the most well known of the artists in England and his influence on Samuel Palmer, who is also represented in this exhibition, was clear to see, but it is the chance to see a collection of Blake's images, exhibited in sequences that has the most powerful effect. I was soon wondering, because of the sequential nature of his art, how he would have responded to the comic book tradition, would he have been a sort of mystic Robert Crumb?
Robert Crumb: Genesis
Thoughts of this type still emerge from my brain, as it was shaped like so many children of the 1950s by having to go to Sunday School for most of our formative years. Therefore the Bible, whether or not we eventually decided to be atheists, would loom large in our creative imaginations. No matter how hard I try to intellectually move beyond notions such as 'good' and 'evil', an all seeing God and a Saviour who died for us all, my neurological wiring from those experiences, is still in place.
I had not seen all of Blake's work in the flesh and in particular had not seen a collection of prints from his 'America' plates before. After looking at them and thinking about how intense the images were and how much could be achieved within such a small surface area, I was fired up to get back to making some prints of my own, this time to perhaps use the new Risographic machine that has just been installed in the university. Good exhibitions always excite me to make more work of my own, they remind me of how wonderful art can be and of how it doesn't seem to go out of date. What Blake was trying to communicate, seemed to me to be as powerful as anything done today and it hit home, right to the heart; but not only Blake, other artists from the same era who had also been selected for this exhibition such as Philipp Otto Runge, all of whom were trying to find visual metaphors for a difficult time of revolution and changing social order.
Philipp Otto Runge
Philipp Otto Runge
I thought Blake stood up very well in comparison to his European counterparts, in particular I thought his visual language was more expressive, especially in the way he pushed the human body into dramatic shapes and positions designed to heighten the body's expressive potential. The exhibition also includes some of Blake's classic images, as well as others I was not so familiar with, such as his satirical portrait of the Pope.
William Blake: Albion’s Angel Rose from Europe: A Prophecy
Blake: The Dance of Albion
The exhibition is open until the 19th of May 2024, so if at all interested do find time to get down and see it before it closes.
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