William Blake: The Painter at Work
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
William Blake: The Painter at Work Details
Amazon.com Review Conservation scientist Joyce H. Townsend is the Tate Museum's answer to coroner Gus Grissom on TV's CSI. Only instead of solving murders, she sleuths out the violence done to great art. In this book, she and her colleagues explain the horrors time, faded pigments, and dumb owners have visited on Blake's paintings, use a slew of high-tech techniques to deduce his methods and open our eyes to his original intentions. If you haven't read this book, you probably don't know what Blake's work looks like. Skillfully employing gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, lasers, Fourier transform infra-red spectrometry, and good old-fashioned saliva on a cotton swab, they scrub away dirt, yellowed varnish, and moronic overpaintings, and reveal how Blake wanted you to see. A tiny edge of blue indicates the firmament that Satan originally strode through in the now-yellowed Satan in His Original Glory. The chemical "Maillard reaction" has horribly browned The Ghost of a Flea; a small detail illustration reveals the original brilliant, star-studded blue Blake intended. The detective work is fascinating, and the profuse illustrations both technically and esthetically illuminating. Blake would have sung hosannas over this book: it cleanses the doors of perception. --Tim Appelo Read more Review "First-rate color and black-and-white illustrations including scientificdetails add to this valuable, first rate study and important contribution." (Choice)"This is a major contribution to Blake scholarship, the first of its kind in many ways. I suspect that it may also set the standard for other such studies of artists. All the essays are firmly grounded in research: materialist, technical, scientific, historical. The information they provide is truly that―information―with accompanying insights, not the sort of speculative interpretations so frequently encountered in literary and iconographic studies of Blake."―Robert Essick, author of William Blake, Printmaker and William Blake and the Language of Adam"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2004""Shortlisted for the 2006 Historians of British Art Book Prize, Multi-authored/Edited Volume category, College Art Association""William Blake himself said 'You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.' While those with a general interest in Blake may find here a surfeit of detail regarding the painter and poet's technique, for Blake experts, painters, and conservationists this will be just enough." (Library Journal) Read more See all Editorial Reviews
Reviews
An indispenasable book for those interested in the latest researchon William Blake's techniques as an artist.