1: An Affordable and Indispensable Volume of Drawings
Published in 1970 this Dover Book DRAWINGS OF WILLIAM BLAKE: 92 PENCIL STUDIES is still available and remains at a very affordable price. Compiled and commented on by Sir Geoffrey Keynes, this resource volume very completely addresses the important pencil drawings Blake made throughout his artistic career.
Though many of these drawings have been published before as Blake's illustrations for 'The Book of Job' and 'The Divine Comedy', this collection which spans his entire career expressing his own personal symbolism, his versions of the great myths, his allegories and his 'grotesques', many in print for the first time. Blake's spiritual nature, and his ability to express it in both poetry and paintings, here includes some wonderfully refined full frontal male and female nudes. But in the end it is his elusive, mystical vision drawings that will register with the reader fully familiar with the life of William Blake. In Blake's words 'Let a Man who has made a Drawing go on & on & he will produce a Picture or Painting, but if he chooses to leave it before he has spoil'd it, he will do a Better Thing'.
The quality of paper in this book is not of the highest, but it matters little. In fact the gradual yellowing that occurs in rag of this sort weds the content with the image even more mysteriously! Grady Harp, February 06
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