Tag: William Blake

Painting Urizen

The characteristics of Urizen emanate from Blake’s painting ‘Ancient of Days’ (1794): holding a compass, he bursts through the clouds to designate ratio and degree into existence.

Urizen appears enveloped in clouds of a somewhat humanoid shape; the clouds appear as silhouettes of people spectating. To the left and right of Urizen appears the faint form of backs of heads, and directly beneath his right foot the arched shadow of a slumped over person.

This observation is perhaps corroborated by the fact that Urizen’s hair blows in the wind abruptly to the left, urging me to approach the painting from a different angle. Only the earthly world subsists in flatness, where Urizen’s eternal existence is omniscient: as such, the painting should not be considered from the one angle imbued in the world of logic, but as an omnipotent spectator.

In the background radiates beams of light, separate and distinct from the circumference of Urizen and the plane of material worldliness, equating to the ‘shining radiance’ and ‘Clear Light’ of Buddhist/enlightenment epistemology.

Starting William Blake

Entering into discourses about one of the most elusive writers of the past three hundred years does not come without it’s steep precipices: Blakean scholars are passionate, and each has their own interpretation. But it is precisely this unclear and mystified nature of Blake’s writing that lends him the title of “poet-artist-prophet” – where each reader must interpret the unfixable symbols into their own schemas.

It is with this awareness and trepidation, then, that I enter into writing my dissertation on William Blake’s metaphysics, his uncanny connections to Buddhist philosophy, and ultimately, analyse the evidence drawing towards his conclusion that “all religions are One.”