The Art of William Blake
“Sometimes, we find a poet, a painter, or a musician who functions like a key that unlocks a part of ourselves we never knew was there…. So it was with me in the early 1960s, at the age of 16, with William Blake.” – Philip Pullman, British writer, born 1946
William Blake, you know, they call people like him eccentrics, or crazies—solitary types howling into the void. But rational? That’s not the word you’d use for Blake, not when every brushstroke and verse pulsates with this raw, fervent humanity that’s all spirit and fire. He had this thing he’d say, it went something like, “Everything is an attempt to be human.” That’s Blake through and through, dodging any neat little box you might try to stuff him into. He’s one of those classic, undefinable British artists, the kind who never really fit into one of those tidy art school categories.
And Blake? He didn’t care about fitting in or what the scene was into. Visionaries like him, they operate on another plane. They’re not about boundaries or labels. They’re about bursting out, driven by this fierce need to share what they see, regardless of whether anyone else gets it.
It can be unsettling, the way visionaries look at the world. They’re off exploring other dimensions, seeing things we can’t even begin to fathom, and all they send back are these intriguing, elusive little hints of what’s out there—like postcards from beyond, written in a code we’re scrambling to understand. And yet, somewhere in those mysterious lines, there’s something that strikes a chord, something eerily resonant.
Blake summed it up like no one else, saying, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand and Eternity in an hour.” How’s that for seeing the big in the small, the eternal in the fleeting?