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Category: William Blake

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And we’re off… We hope.

An angel helps me out.
Jerusalem, by Carol L. Douglas. Yesterday I decided to illustrate Blake’s poem. I got exactly this far.

I’m writing this on my phone in line in the airport, where we and many other Americans have met up to take the last scheduled flight from Argentina.

We left our hotel at 7 AM for an 11:30 flight, expecting to be detained at roadblocks. The inbound traffic lanes proceeded slowly but, outbound, police waved us through. They’re no doubt happy to send us on our way. Nonetheless, our flight is already delayed an hour.

From my fourth-floor aerie I peered into many cars over the past few days. They typically had papers on their dashboard. Before this trip I wouldn’t have understood that these were documents that must be produced on demand. Even though I don’t want to see America as a police state, I understand the impulse to crack down. This is a very large, tightly-packed city, and the pandemic could do terrific damage.

Casa Rosada. That’s as close as we ever got to tourism.

We drove past the Casa Rosada, the Argentine White House, on our way out of town. That’s as close as we have been to seeing the sights. From there to the airport, Buenos Aires is much like any other city in the world: pricey high-rises tapering to smaller, less-lovely structures, to an industrial beltway and then, finally, suburbs and towns. Our national identity may come from places like the Casa Rosada and White House, but the truth is that for most of us, the places we call home are interchangeable.

With the exception of a few cities, Americans don’t have a taste for living in tower blocks. That makes us odd compared to most nations. Even Canadians seem to like living in high-rises, judging from cities like Toronto and Ottawa. But we Americans are suburban in the same way our British and Australian cousins are. For us, “home” is optimally two stories and includes a small patch of green.

Empty airport

Thinking about home, I decided to make my last painting a line from that great British hymn, Jerusalem. It is sort of an unofficial British anthem, and is based on a poem by the visionary artist William Blake. Each line could yield a painting or three.

The cost of this pandemic is borne by all of us. We have incurred some terrific expenses in the form of flights we cannot take and accommodations. The Hilton Buenos Aires was our only option and it did not come cheap. But I was shocked to learn that an individual donor covered the entire bill for all ten of us.

I know who this person is, and that he doesn’t want his name shared. I mention it because it’s common in our culture to vilify people for not giving, or not caring. And yet so many people do wonderful things in very private ways, not so they can be publicly lauded, but simply because they see a need. Remember that next time you want to castigate a political opponent as selfish or uncaring.

“[W]hen you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you,” says the Gospel of Matthew. There are a lot of people who live that creed.

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Monday Morning Art School: Aging the model

Aging is highly individual but it follows certain predictable paths. Here are some hints to drawing plausible older people.
The Ancient of Days, William Blake, 1794. Relief etching with watercolor. The figure is a curious pastiche of an older face and a young body. Courtesy British Museum

Last week, I shared a drawing of my model in which I managed to make her look fifteen years old.

No two people age the same way. That’s especially true in our modern world, where aging gracefully is a sign of affluence. Many of us have had discreet work ‘done’—including me—and we live less-taxing lives than our ancestors. We keep our hair and brows more stylishly than our forebearers. Most of us retain our teeth; in the US, we keep them whitened. On the other hand, more of us are plagued by obesity, which ages our faces.
Our experiences leave their mark. The weather-beaten lobsterman and an office-worker will age quite differently. The northeastern US is kind to skin, because it’s humid and cool, whereas the sun of the southwest is harsh.
Portrait of the Artist’s Mother at the Age of 63. Albrecht Dürer, courtesy Kupferstichkabinett. In one sense, this is an example of how dramatically aging has changed, but if you get past the toothlessness, the changes happen the same way today. Note the cording of her neck and the receding temple.
The human face can be ennobled by ascetism or coarsened by consumption, depending on how we’ve lived. Smokers develop a system of wrinkles because nicotine causes narrowing of the blood vessels in the epidermis.  And then there’s the thing none of us can do anything about: our genes.
Our culture venerates the 25-year-old face, but our faces settle into maturity once we pass thirty. By our fifties, those changes are accelerating rapidly, as our face assumes its elderly shape.
There are more telling signs of aging in the face than wrinkles. The eye socket becomes deeper, leading to pouching under the eyes. Closely related to this, the temples deepen and cheekbones become more evident. As if to compensate for this increased definition above the cheekbones, the lower parts of our faces sag. The flesh of our cheeks droops. Creases form along our noses and mouths.
A very unflattering selfie taken this morning showing the recession at the temples and delineation of the cheekbones. When I was younger, my face was nearly a perfect oval, but I’ve managed to get it all stretched out by now. (The bags under my eyes are just tiredness.)

Our noses and earlobes grow all our lives. The tip of the nose may turn downward in a person lucky enough to achieve extreme old age. The soft tissue below our jaw starts to sag. The cords of ours neck become more visible after age 60.

At around age 40, a series of furrows appear on our faces. They can be vertical between the brows and along the mouth, but are often horizontal. Most of us don’t get every possible wrinkle, but merely the ones to which we’re predisposed. Wrinkles are not lines or cracks, but folds of skin. Lines are a poor way of representing them.
Head of an Old Man, 1521, Albrecht Dürer, courtesy of the Albertina. Wrinkles are folds, not crevasses. 
Our skin becomes less luminous in middle age, but often in extreme old age it regains the translucence of childhood.
One of the most telling signs of age is the thickness of our hair. In both genders, hairlines recede and our hair thins. Again, this is an area of aging where much work is done to conceal changes but it would be odd to see a glorious mane of hair on an elderly person.
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The greatest draftsman of modern times

A cinematic genius who could do his finished drawings in a single take. Wow!
Storyboard with notes by Jack Kirby, provenance unknown.

I was leafing through Facebook the other day and came across the above storyboard. Not only is it brilliantly composed, but it is worked out in a single draft across the panels. That’s essentially backwards from the way most artists work. We start slowly, letting our fingers work out the ideas through multiple sketches. But nothing about this work is haphazard.

This is the work of that most brilliant American artist of the 20th century, Jack Kirby. To understand him better, I consulted Alan Spinney, who’s been reading and drawing comics forever.
Pencil panels along with final inked versions. Kirby did not ink his own work. Courtesy of Alan Spinney.
“Jack Kirby was one of the fastest comic artists in history, and was kind of driven,” Spinney told me. Kirby did not make preliminary sketches, rough work or layouts. He started work directly on his board. He rarely erased, the story having flowed from his mind fully formed.
Pencil art from Fantastic Four, courtesy of Alan Spinney, from TwoMorrow’s Publishing.
Kirby was raised in the tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the son of a garment worker. Perhaps that’s how he learned to work so fast. He taught himself to draw by tracing characters from comic strips and editorial cartoons. At age 14, he enrolled at the Pratt Institute. He lasted exactly one week.
Black Panther concept by Jack Kirby, courtesy of Alan Spinney, from TwoMorrow’s Publishing.
“I wasn’t the kind of student that Pratt was looking for. They wanted people who would work on something forever. I didn’t want to work on any project forever. I intended to get things done.” Kirby got his first professional drawing gig at the tender age of 19.
His meeting with Joe Simon resulted in the creation of Captain America and a working partnership that would last a decade and a half.
“I had a suit and Jack thought that was really nice. He’d never seen a comic book artist with a suit before. The reason I had a suit was that my father was a tailor. Jack’s father was a tailor too, but he made pants,” said Simon.
One of Jack Kirby’s fantastical machines. Courtesy of Alan Spinney.
Knowing his star artists were about to be drafted into WW2, their publisher asked them to ‘bank’ material. The pair hired writers, inkers, letterers and colorists and created a year’s worth of panels.
Kirby went on to repeat a similar performance in the 1960s, with Stan Lee.  “He would do script breakdowns for other artists to draw from, like thumbnails,” Spinney said. “They would finish the drawings and ink them, so all the books looked like Kirby drew them.”
From Jack Kirby Quarterly, published by TwoMorrow’s Publishing.
Jack Kirby was, above all, dynamic. He pushed people through his stories in a cinematic way. “I found myself competing with the movie camera. I had to compete with the camera. I felt like John Henry … I tore my characters out of the panels. I made them jump all over the page. I tried to make that cohesive so that it would be easier to read. I had to get my characters in extreme positions, and in doing so I created an extreme style, which was recognizable by everybody,” Kirby said.
“Marvel worked very loosely; Kirby and Stan Lee would chat about a story, Kirby would draw it and then Lee would write the dialogue,” said Spinney. “Kirby was famous for his machines, his character design, and high drama in his figures.”
Photocopy of page from Fantastic Four, courtesy of Alan Spinney, from TwoMorrow’s Publishing
His collaboration with Lee resulted in more abstraction, foreshortening and diagonal motion, all relentlessly driving the reader. It also resulted in a Pantheon of superheroes who have influenced all comic art since. 
“Jack Kirby was the William Blake of comics and New Gods was his masterpiece, an epic cosmic war between evil gods and good gods,” wroteGrant Morrison. Comic books may seem trivial to some, but in the hands of a master, they dealt with the deepest issues of our times.
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Who is your true muse?

Mine, I’m afraid, is a 19th century religious crackpot.
The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy, 1795. William Blake’s vision of the Greek goddess Hecate, courtesy of the Tate.

It would be very easy for me to create a list of artists I adore. They’d range from Albrecht Dürer to the contemporary landscape painter James Morrison. If there’s a common thread, it’s beautiful drafting, keen observation, and a high level of skill.

It’s harder to face up to the truth of how I actually think. The closest I come, I’m afraid, is to that untidy English mystic, William Blake. That’s probably why I find his work so unsettling.
From The Song of Los, 1795, William Blake, courtesy Library of Congress
It’s not just the religious thing, although Blake was an ardent Christian of a Swedenborgianflavor. It wasn’t just his animosity to organized religion. It’s not his passionate interest in language paired with painting. Off my leash and into my own heart’s material, I end up painting souls who look like Blake’s.
Blake grew up in the Age of Liberty, and the writings of men like Thomas Paine informed his sense of state, religion, faith and man. But mostly, he was just ahead of his time. At the time when Jane Austen was writing Sense and Sensibility, he was raging like a Beat Poet:
If he had been Antichrist Creeping Jesus,
He’d have done anything to please us:
Gone sneaking into Synagogues
And not us’d the Elders & Priests like Dogs,
But humble as a Lamb or Ass,
Obey’d himself to Caiaphas…

The Whirlwind of Lovers, c. 1827, from Blake’s illustrations for the Divine Comedy, courtesy of the Tate.
Blake was a visionary in the strict sense of the word: he literally experienced visions. They were usually associated with religious themes, and they sparked his creative work.
Blake believed he was personally instructed and encouraged by archangels, who then read the work he created. For him the barrier between heaven and earth was membrane-thin. I envy that.
Albion from A Large Book of Designs, 1793-96, William Blake, courtesy of the British Museum
What do his vast mythological creations mean? Are Urizen, Tharmas,  Orc and Los a new religious mythology or some kind of brilliant Biblical fanfic along the lines of C. S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien?
I have a copy of William Blake: Watercolors to the Divine Comedy. Forget David Bindman’s commentary; Blake’s observations are what’s important. He strains against Dante’s theology in furious little margin notes.  (The Divine Comedy is, of course, also religious fanfic.)
The commission for this work came to Blake in 1826 through the once-famous English painter John Linnell. Their goal was to produce a new edition of the Divine Comedy with engravings based on Blake’s watercolors. The project ended with Blake’s death in 1827, but even incomplete, they’re a fascinating work by a stirring mind.
The Simoniac Pope c. 1824–7, from William Blake’s illustrations for the Divine Comedy, courtesy of the Tate.
Tragically, his more contentious manuscripts were burned after his wife’s death by Frederick Tatham, who opposed anything that smelled of blasphemy. Would Blake have cared? I doubt it. 
He went to his death with a joy most of us can only dream about. That day, he worked assiduously on his Dante drawings. Then he turned to his wife and said, “Stay, Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me.” On finishing, he laid down his pencil and began to sing hymns and verses until he died.
“I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel,” said one witness.
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What is sacred art?

The conflict between my religious and art training is pushing me into a far smarter painting.

Christ Pantocrator, 6th century AD. The two sides of his face may represent the two natures of Christ as fully God and fully human. From Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai
English is wordy because it preserves parallel versions (synonyms) from its source languages. Sacred comes to us via the Norman Invasion, from the Old French sacrer, which in turn came from the Latin sacrare. Its root means “to sanctify,” or set apart, free from sin. Holy means the exact same thing, but it comes to us from the Saxon invaders of Britain. Its roots lie somewhere in the northern Scandinavian forests.
Very little is known about Germanic paganism, so we can only infer what was holy—the mountain Helgafell among the Norse, possibly megaliths and holy trees among the Anglo-Saxons. But the existence of words for holiness tell us that there were places, or values, that were set aside from sinful man.
Moses Indignant at the Golden Calf, 1799-1800, William Blake
Household gods are a commonly recurring feature in pagan religions and folklore worldwide. They’re ancient objects of protection. They’re called teraphim in the Bible, which forbids them. In fact, the Bible repeatedly warns its followers against idolatry, most famously in the story of the golden calf.
The prohibition against idols is felt particularly strongly among Protestants. It led to a misguided wave of iconoclasm across Northern Europe and England in the 16th century that destroyed much of our pre-Enlightenment art.
Sacred art, by definition, would be art set aside for the purpose of worship. It’s very easy to see how music, dance and the decorative arts can be used in worship, but less easy to see such an application for painting or sculpture. Within Catholicism, there are vessels like monstrances, tabernacles and chalices. These receive a reflected glow of veneration, although it is the transubstantiated Christ that’s the true subject.  
Rachel sitting on the teraphim, 1726-1728, fresco, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches have icons, religious symbols meant as aids to prayer. Icons are venerated, but they also served as teaching tools for the illiterate faithful. In a way they reflect the wonder of the incarnation, since they’re a tangible representation of an intangible God. As the Eastern Orthodox Council of 860 proclaimed, “all that is uttered in words written in syllables is also proclaimed in the language of colors.”
And that’s, pretty much, the limit of sacred art in the western tradition, The rest—as beautiful and transcendent as it may be—is not intended for veneration. Within Protestant Europe, religious artwork was meant primarily for purposes of edification, honor, comfort, contemplation, and inspiration. But it’s not set aside or sanctified, except that it may be part of a sanctuary or shrine.
As a dyed-in-the-wool American Evangelical, I feel those limits keenly. When I’m called to make a religious image, I tend to slip sideways. I’m working on such a painting right now, and my own religious training is rumbling with the artist in me. How does one represent the character of God without presuming to paint the face of God? How does one represent the love of Jesus without making an idol?
The conflict is invigorating, and making for a far smarter painting. I can barely wait to get to work on it again.
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A sane estimate of my capabilities

"The Creation of Adam," c. 1508-1512, Michelangelo

“The Creation of Adam,” c. 1508-1512, Michelangelo
The other day I read a translation of Romans 12:3 that cracked me up: “Don’t cherish exaggerated ideas of yourself or your importance, but try to have a sane estimate of your capabilities by the light of the faith that God has given to you all.”
I think of myself as a person who can do anything, and I pretty much have done. However, a ‘sane estimate’ of my capabilities probably ought not continue to include stripping wallpaper. My back is in open rebellion this morning.
My self-worth doesn’t lie in the things I make with my hands, but my work is how I spend my days. Would I continue to paint if I were confined to a wheelchair and could no longer scramble around rocks while doing so? I don’t know. Would I continue to create if I were blind? I don’t know.

"The Ancient of Days in Europe a Prophecy," copy D, 1794, William Blake

“The Ancient of Days in Europe a Prophecy,” copy D, 1794, William Blake
Would I be less valuable without a strong back or good eyes? No. Would I be happy? Since I’m thrown if the toothpaste is in the wrong drawer, the answer is a decided no.
When I was 40 years old, I ran. I was fit enough to still wear a two-piece bathing suit. That year I had cancer that resulted in a colostomy. Not only was my appliance ugly, uncomfortable and expensive to maintain, but it leaked. There’s nothing like bowel spillage down your shirt to undermine any sense that you’re beautiful or desirable.
Eventually, they were able to reverse my ostomy, but in the time I had it, it changed something in my self-concept. I was no longer powerful and sexy; I was a cancer survivor. I’ve written about shedding that latter self-identity, but I’m afraid these self-images might be like the layers of an onion.
Detail from "The Creation of Adam"

Detail from “The Creation of Adam”
I was at a class this week where groups were asked to make posters. I flipped open my phone to Blake’s The Ancient of Days, which, I thought, made the visual point better than anything I might draw. Another person grabbed a marker and translated Blake’s idea to poster form. A third translated it to words. Even though I wasn’t drawing, I was still operating within ‘a sane estimate’ of my abilities.
The Ancient of Days was not intended by Blake to be a portrait of God. He is Urizen, a demiurge. That, in gnostic systems, is an artisan who makes and maintains our physical universe. In our popular imagination, Urizen has come to represent the creative face of God. (Blake was a true seer, subject to visions from the age of four, but he was also a Christian.)
Note the hand holding the compass in The Ancient of Days. It is taut, energetic, and in absolute control.
Detail from "The Creation of Adam"

Detail from “The Creation of Adam”
Compare that hand to the hand of God in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. Again, God’s hand is taut and active. Adam’s is limp. God is surrounded by the unborn, in a great carapace that resembles a human uterus. Chief among these is Eve. Still in the womb, wrapped in God’s embrace, she looks more lifelike than her future mate. Michelangelo is making a point here: our life force comes from God.
Like life itself, the gifts we have are transitory. Once given, they can be lost again in an instant. They don’t totally define us, but they are a part of who we are.
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Comparing yourself to others

Romance of Autumn, 1916, by George Bellows. I’m leading with a painting that makes me squirm every time I see it, to make a point: if you judged Bellows by this single painting, you’d think he didn’t know how to mix or apply paint. But he knew exactly what he was doing, as his catalogue attests.
The other day Brad Marshall jokingly asked us whether he or Anders Zorn was better looking. We of course immediately said that Brad was. “Oh, well, Zorn was the better painter,” he replied.
“Not better, just different,” I answered.
As mature artists, most painters have achieved mastery over their materials.  What we react to isn’t their technical skill, but how they speak to us. When we don’t like their work, it’s usually more a question of not responding to their worldview than that they are technically deficient.
Illustration to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hell, by William Blake. Blake was painting his edgy, uncomfortable, oddly-drafted work at a time when the highly-finished Grand Manner was in vogue. No wonder that his work was almost forgotten until he was rediscovered by Victorian England. Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest artists England ever produced.
It’s only in the learning phase that one painter is ‘better’ than the next, and even that is transitory. Some of us are faster learners than others, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be better painters in the end.
Last weekend, one of my beginning students got very frustrated. She was having trouble understanding why I asked her to lay down paint in a specific way. It didn’t help that her classmates were sailing through the exercise.
“I feel like everyone is doing a great job except me,” she said.
Childhood’s Garden, 1917, by Charles Burchfield. His genius lies in his spirit and vision. He is often called the dark Edward Hopper, but many of his paintings radiate happiness.
Like most artists—experienced or not—she really has no idea where her strengths lie. She is emotionally transparent, so what she feels vibrates through her drawing. When she’s happy, her trees dance, the pavements sing. When she’s not happy, her canvas glowers.
That is a kind of talent that can’t be taught or bought, but can only be nurtured like a seedling set out in a garden bed. And it’s so easy to knock such a talent apart, because it comes from one’s inner vision, and that’s a fragile thing.


Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. My Belfast, ME, workshop is almost sold out. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Six Days of Advent: The Mystical Nativity

The Nativity, 1912, Sir Stanley Spencer. Joseph is off to the right, doing something to the chestnut tree.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Raphael, Rubens, Tiepolo, Correggio, and the other great painters who’ve painted exquisite Nativities. But there is something arresting about the mystical nativity, where reality is somehow subsumed in spiritual fervor.
Sir Stanley Spencer painted the Nativity, top, as a student at Slade in 1912. He later explained:
The couple occupy the centre of the picture, Joseph who is to the extreme right doing something to the chestnut tree and Mary who stands by the manger…  Joseph is only related to Mary in this picture by some sacramental ordinance… This relationship has always interested me and in those early works I contemplated a lot of those unbearable relationships between men and women.  
The embracing couple represents physical love in contrast to Mary and Joseph’s spiritual connection. That goes with Spencer’s amazingly messed-up attitudes toward women and sex. Spencer’s strict separation between the spiritual and the physical is the neo-Platonic trap into which many of the mystic painters fall. The whole point of the Incarnation is that God becomes man, sharing our joys, sorrows, and, yes, the messy realities of our births and deaths.
 

Nativity, 1310, Giotto. Joseph seems to be sleeping.

Giotto is generally considered the first Renaissance painter, but he was firmly in touch with his medieval self. That gave him a leg up for mysticism. The pre-Renaissance world was able to see in a non-literal way that is almost completely lost to us. This allows the infant John the Baptist to sit at the bottom of the frame while Jesus is being born, and the almost-disembodied angels that arch across the top of the painting like a Byzantine architrave.
 

The Nativity, 1492, Domenico Ghirlandaio. You have to zoom in to see her laser-beam prayer. What is it with poor Joseph? Asleep again.

Domenico Ghirlandaio painted the Virgin Mary sending laser beams of prayer down to the infant Jesus while a heavenly choir sings above. The columns and one-point perspective point us that much farther along the Renaissance.  All that gold leaf you’re seeing in the Italian paintings of this time is supposed to remind you of the untarnished nature of the story.
 

The Mystical Nativity, 1500-01, Sandro Botticelli. Believe it or not, Joseph is sleeping.

Sandro Botticelli described the Nativity as the moment when heaven and earth touch. He was painting at the apogee of the Italian Renaissance, which accounts for the more concrete nature of his visionary angels—he couldn’t throttle back on the realism like Giotto or Ghirlandaio . In his later years, Botticelli fell under the influence of a fanatical Florentine preacher, Savonarola. There is something almost manic in the earthly action in this painting that points to the spiritual oppression of the time.
The Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele, 1434-36, Jan van Eyck. Joseph doesn’t even show up for this one.
By the fifteenth century, the idea of the Virgin Mary as intercessor for the sinful had gained traction. Jan van Eyck’s The Madonna with Canon van der Paele shows the donor beseeching the Virgin Mary and Sts. Donatian and George. The intense realism and the fine architectural drawing contrast with the unreality of these four figures sharing a common space.
The Nativity, c. 1810, William Blake. At least Joseph is actually present.
William Blake painted the above panel, on copper, concurrently with his Europe, a Prophecy, from which comes his wonderful Ancient of Days painting. At about the same time, he also painted a series of watercolors illustrating Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”:
It was the winter wild,
While the Heav’n-born child,
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies…
But Blake, as usual, strayed off into his neo-Platonic world-view. Here the soul of Jesus leaps fully formed toward the soul of John the Baptist. No encumbrances such as the messy reality of childbirth or our imprisonment in our fleshly bodies gets in the way.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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More on that Christian art thing

Knight, Death and the Devil, woodcut, by Albrecht Dürer, 1513
Part of the heated discussion that ensued after my post Friday about the so-called problem of Christian music expressed a general irritation with performers who identify themselves as Christian artists. We’re all aware of the capacity of modern artists to drape themselves over the cross for marketing purposes. However, there has always been a distinction between artists who work in religious themes because that is their marketplace, and those who are genuinely faith-driven.
Albrecht Dürer achieved extraordinary success very quickly. He produced a variety of works including many of a secular nature, and actively sought and exploited the patronage of Maximillian I. None of that indicates a profoundly religious man.
However, Dürer left a large body of writing that indicates that at some time he had a true religious conversion. He became an early and enthusiastic follower of Martin Luther.  His new Protestant sympathies can be felt in his later work, a transition pushed along by the death of his patron in 1519.
In 1524, Dürer wrote that “because of our Christian faith we have to stand in scorn and danger, for we are reviled and called heretics.” And in expressing thanks for the gift of one of Luther’s books, he wrote, “I pray Your Honor to convey my humble gratitude to His Electoral grace, and beg him humbly that he will protect the praiseworthy Dr. Martin Luther for the sake of Christian truth. It matters more than all the riches and power of this world, for with time everything passes away; only the truth is eternal.”
Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini (‘The Whirlwind of Lovers’) 1826-7, from William Blake’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
William Blake is another artist whose copious writings make his religious fervor easy to document. However, understanding them is another matter entirely. (I confess I take him in small doses.) His illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy include extensive margin notes in which he argues with Dante’s theology.
Blake was literally a visionary: he saw visions from childhood on. He was a believer, but he hated the church. His contemporaries thought him quite mad. But his poem “And did those feet in ancient time” comes down to us as the great patriotic hymn Jerusalem, set by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916.
I kind of like his assessment of the character of Jesus:

If he had been Antichrist Creeping Jesus,
He’d have done anything to please us:
Gone sneaking into Synagogues
And not us’d the Elders & Priests like Dogs,
But humble as a Lamb or Ass,
Obey’d himself to Caiaphas.
God wants not Man to Humble himself.

Conversion on the Way to Damascus by Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio, 1601
Compare these two painters to Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio, another brilliant painter of religious scenes. His patrons were Cardinal Francesco del Monte and Cardinal Girolamo Mattei, and his subject matter was overwhelmingly religious, but Caravaggio could by no stretch of the imagination be described as a “Christian artist.” A brawler with an extensive police record, he managed to nick a rival in the groin with his sword, severing an artery and killing the poor man. This led to Caravaggio’s exile and ultimately to his death.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!