The Book of Beginnings after William Blake
by Art Enrico
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Price
$900
Dimensions
30.000 x 24.000 inches
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Title
The Book of Beginnings after William Blake
Artist
Art Enrico
Medium
Painting - Acrylic On Canvas
Description
William Blake was a poet, painter, and mystic. He claimed to speak with Old Testament prophets and to have actually seen the face of God when he was a child. He was a devoted Christian, but believed in a Christianity very different than mainstream Christianity in his day or ours. In Blake’s cosmology, the god of the Old Testament, depicted in his very famous illustration “The Ancient of Days,” is not a positive figure. In fact God the Father was an evil figure, an oppressive law-giver. Blake was suspicious of both Reason and Science. He believed deeply in Art and that imagination was the true way to God.
My painting was based on an illustration from Blake’s poem “The First Book of Urizen,” printed in 1794. Urizen and The Ancient of Days were one and the same person. Blake described Urizen as “A self-contemplating shadow, in enormous labors occupied.” When I read that, I was put in mind of a quote from the Mundaka Upanishad: “The deathless Self meditated upon himself and projected the universe as evolutionary energy.” True to the spirit of Blake, I re-imagined his Creator God as the creative force out of the Upanishad rather than the Old Testament. With apologies to Blake, I find the philosophy of Monism far more satisfying than Dualism.
Uploaded
August 9th, 2020
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