William Blake, Tate Britain

 William Blake’s exhibition at Tate Britain was the largest show of his work for 20 years and the Tate clearly aimed to portray his relevance to the contemporary world. It was extensive and had many rooms, with a mixture of paintings, books, engravings and their plates. Blake created an entire mythology that his works existed within, with larger-than-life characters and dramatic worlds. His characters were symbolic of different ideologies and forces in the world, such as his character Urizen who represented rationality, laws and reason. Urizen is depicted holding tools such as compasses or architect’s tools, trying to measure and restrain the world.

Blake was passionate about the mystery and magic in the universe and often felt like science was crushing that freedom. This idea is interesting to me as I often resent science and logic for taking the fun out of things, for example I enjoy reading about extra-terrestrial or paranormal encounters for their excitement, mystery and horror and am always disappointed when I read the rational or scientific reasoning for such an event and see that it’s probably true. I am also inspired by the idea of the mind when it is spoken about in the metaphysical and philosophical manor that it was in early psychoanalysis. The idea of an infinite and impossibly complex ethereal space that houses our very being and has many layers and mysteries captures my imagination and wonder and when the logic of neuroscience can pinpoint the areas of squashy tissue in our brain that operate certain things it turns this ethereal space into just another fleshy body part that reacts to stimuli and this loses all the magic in my mind. However I am also excited by science in the new mysteries that it reveals, such as the quantum mechanic’s experiments that showed us that light particles act differently under observation, or the bizarre and unethical experiments scientists have conducted on humans and animals in recent history such as the story of the Russian scientist who managed to fuse two dogs together or the story of Dolly the cloned sheep.

One thing that struck me about this exhibition was the size of Blake’s works. They were all very small, all except one were under A2, which was surprising considering their epic narratives and dramatic compositions. This showed me that a powerful and awesome piece can be created on a small scale, and that you needn’t always make a painting 2 meters high if you want it to give a sense of power to the viewer. The largest piece in the show was An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man which was 151.8 x 120.9 cm. Part of the reason for this was that Blake wasn’t very successful in his own lifetime, he wasn’t respected enough by his contemporaries to be given the career of a wealthy artist and so spent most of his time making engravings of other people’s artwork. This meant that Blake wasn’t offered any large-scale commissions and didn’t have the money to make large pieces off his own back.

In this exhibition the Tate honoured Blake’s wish to one day make a large commission for a church and digitally enlarged some of his pieces to the measurements he had planned for and projected it within the gallery with the backdrop of a church space. This and the mock-up of the gallery space above the workshop that Blake had his one and only exhibition whilst alive was the Tate’s way of making a printmaker, painter and poet from the 1800’s work into more of an immersive show. They did this alongside reframed writings of his political and aspirational thinking to sell us the message that Blake was still relevant and assumingly to try and bring his appeal to young people.

As a young person I wasn’t particularly all too thrilled about a big projection or a mock domestic room within a gallery, I was there for the spiritual and eerie illustrations of tightly muscle-bound gods and devils flying around and fighting. I have been interested in archetypes and religion in the telling of stories of dread and overwhelming power for a long time and have experimented (and continue to do so) with the symbols and language of old religious imagery in my own artwork. The skill in Blake that I find inspiring is his weird and spooky figures, with their scaly and thin skin, their odd-shaped bodies, their dramatic poses and compositions, and their eternal struggle with nature and I hope to absorb some of this language and allow it to influence some of the figures and compositions in my work.