Special Tour of William Blake: Apprentice and Master Exhibition
Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm
Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont St, Oxford
Edward Youansamouth
Edward Youansamouth, collaborating with the Ashmolean Museum through its Project Portal, will lead a special tour of the exhibition exploring the connection between Blake's innovative artistic practice and his personal theology of the Imagination, which prioritises direct apprehension of the divine through an ‘apocalyptic’ cleansing of the ‘doors of perception’. By looking at some of the objects in the ‘William Blake: Apprentice and Master’ exhibition, we will consider how Blake’s method of ‘printing in the infernal method’, referred to by modern scholars as ‘relief-etching’, relates to his theological desire to reveal ‘the Infinite in all things’. It will be suggested that Blake’s works of illuminated printing participate in the very apocalypse (‘unveiling’) of perception that they describe: ‘the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite and corrupt’.
