William Blake, Remote by the Sea
laphamsquarterly.org
laphamsquarterly.org
What I find so teasingly difficult to explain is that despite being so different there is some shared aesthetic value between them that I cannot quite pin down in words.
Perhaps their strong geometric undertones and a certain muscularity in them.
Those three guys could wipe the floor with most of modern art.
(The Blake painting is tucked away in an almost-attic of the now "Tate Britain" old building in a quiet out of the way street, while the "Tate Modern" blockhouse graces the Thames south bank, mostly filled with glitzy trash. So it goes.)
The protagonist is William Blake - boards a train to the town of Machine.
The Milton prints, Songs of Innocence, plus the illustrations of the Book of Revelations were pre-Romantic steel engravings.
I regard Blake to be this anti-positivist character in the 19th century.
Anti-Kant, anti-Newton.