This past July while in Dublin, I visited William Blake: The Age of Romantic Fantasy, an exhibition at National Gallery of Ireland — positioning William Blake at the center with his contemporaries and admirers. Attached are two scans from my music paper notebook, which I use as a tool for my observations, writings and project development as I move through time in my painting practice.
In thinking about this exhibition, I kept returning to specific images that I took with my phone camera while in the gallery. These consist of works by Blake in addition to other artists whose work I had never encountered previously. Firstly, what struck me in Blake’s “The Bard, From Gray” was its near illegibility—meaning, the dense application of gold leaf / egg tempera in what he described as a ‘fresco technique’. From afar, it appeared as a gleaming abstraction, with the scene unfolding only after one veers close to the surface of the painting. Contorted figures slowly reveal themselves amidst the curving gestures and forms within the composition. As if a page from an illuminated manuscript, this work inhabits a singular universe, a visual language unto its own.
In “Satan Smiting Job With Sore Boils”, an ink and tempera work on mahogany, the image unfolds with the ephemeral quality of a watercolor. A narrative scene dramatically unfolds, with fragments of landscape pieced together in the background space (detail below). I found this rendering of landscape incredibly contemporary, futuristic even, projecting ahead in time to the world of science fiction. In “Teach These Souls to Fly”, 1794, another narrative unfolds where gravity pulls us horizontally through the composition, as if we are with the two characters in space. Blake’s abstract bands of painterly color drape the background sky, evoking canonical works from modernist painting. In using materials and techniques such as etching, ink and watercolor, Blake achieves a timelessness in his work, the transitory within the historical, a fantastical contemporary.
— Throughout the several rooms, I discovered compelling watercolors by William James Muller, Thomas Girtin, and Alexander Cozens. The depiction of architecture and landscape, vulnerable against the backdrop of nature’s turbulence, brought to mind the late works of John Constable, JMW Turner, and Victor Hugo. In Cozens’s work, I learned that he became known for his ‘blot’ paintings, compositions that grew out of random marks. Such description led me back in time to spring 2025, when I visited an exhibition of Victor Hugo’s ink drawings at The Royal Academy in London. In using similar techniques of erasure and blotting, amid depictions of animals, architecture, the human form, etc., Hugo created a space in between—an abstraction that suspends time, or collapses time.
The last image below is by John Hamilton Mortimer, Fish Devouring Shell Food, Watercolor and ink on paper, from the collection of Tate, U.K.
From the eighteenth century, fast forward to the twenty-first century. The savagery of this image is unforgettable, an exquisite rendering of nature that appears human-like, survivalist greed thrashing it out amid the ephemeral, watery, dreamy atmosphere of a timeless, romantic landscape.
John Hamilton Mortimer (1740–1779,), Fish Devouring Shell Food, undated, Watercolor and ink on paper, 281 × 424 millimeters, Tate, U.K.