William Blake was in turn ignored, considered mad, and called a genius and one of the greatest British artists. A visionary painter, printmaker and poet active during the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, Blake pulled elements from classicism and romanticism, stirred them in the fires of his own wild imaginings and produced art that stood outside his time and the normal chronology of art history.

His classical influences came from dramatic painters like Raphael and Michelangelo, and particularly printmakers like Durer. Blake worked in a fascinating process of “relief etching” in which the traditional method of scratching lines out of wax resist and biting those lines with acid was reversed by drawing the lines with acid resistant material and biting away the rest of the plate, leaving the raised surface to print, like a woodblock.

Blake had a history of visions, even from childhood, reportedly seeing God, Angels, and his dead brother Robert. Out of his visions he created his own mythology, populated with fantastical images that would give modern concept artists a few lessons in character creation. Blake continued through his life to find more inspiration in his imagination than in the immediate world around him.

Though he had little love for the established church, he was fascinated with the Bible and did several series of biblical illustrations, most notably for the book of Revelation. He also produced illustrations for Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as taking on a commission to illustrate Dante’s Inferno, which was started, but incomplete a the time of his death.

Blake associated with other artists of his time who were involved with what they saw as a spiritual and artistic revival and considered a “New Age”, as embodied in the philosophy of Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. These included John Linnell and Samuel Palmer; but most of them, like Blake, did not see commercial success in their lifetimes.

Though he admired the works of the Renaissance masters and the traditions of Gothic art, Blake’s watercolors and etchings often have an element of primitivism that may account for the lack of respect during his lifetime, but from a later vantage point have a remarkable power and presence. The image above is “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun”.

Blake’s art and writing have inspired generations of artists, poets and, in the 1960’s, found particular resonance with a counter-culture that found him a champion of free-thinking, sexual liberty and the triumph of imagination, as exemplified by the opening lines of his lyrical poem Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Yep, sounds like a tripped-out, hippified, counter culture freakazoid to me. Right on.

When I was a teenager, I used to amuse myself by making pseudo-Surrealist collages, painstakingly cutting images out of magazines and pasting them together in whatever jarring juxtapositions my fevered little brain could cook up. This was pre-Photoshop, and the ease of digital image manipulation has rendered that kind of collage a bit moot.

I’m still fascinated, though, with the artful and effective use of collage as an artistic technique, something I find rare (not the use of collage, the effective use of collage). I’m also always interested in traditional draftsmanship, so I was impressed with the combination of techniques employed by New York artist Ann Marshall.

Marshall draws/paints pastel portraits and incorporates them into composition in which they are surrounded by, and intertwined with, elements of collage, apparently taken from magazines and other sources. Her portraits are usually of women or girls, sometime formal, sometimes very casual, and feature large areas which are, in essence, rendered in collage. By that I mean that the collage elements are used as textures, patterns or areas of color and detail to suggest a dress, a bedspread, or part of a background, the way a painter might employ stipple or scumbling as a technique to accomplish similar ends.

Her portraits, though occasionally given the name of the sitter, often have interesting names like “Connecticut Could Never Quite Contain Her” and “Weddings Bored Her, Even Her Own” (image above).

I get the impression that, as fascinating as they are in photographs on the web, Marshall’s works probably suffer more than most from the limits of photographic reproduction due to the physical nature of collage, and would dramatically benefit from being viewed in person.

Those in New York can see her work as part of a two-person show, along with Matthew Wood, at The Gallery at Lincoln Center in the Concourse Level of the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan from now until June 30, 2007.

As I pointed out in my post on Chardin, still life is a branch of painting that doesn’t get the respect that it deserves, even though it has remained a staple of gallery art for centuries, and continues to be a popular area for contemporary artists.

Still life may, in fact, be gaining ground in certain circles, particularly among those engaged the the practice of “painting-a-day” that I’ve been reporting on over the last year and a half. The immediacy and availability of subject matter lends itself well to the practical realities of that discipline.

For all of that, in the eyes of many, still life remains the chartered accountant, librarian and legal secretary of painting subjects — useful, but dull. Perhaps cast drawing is thought of as slightly less exciting.

However, in the same sense that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”, excitement in a painting subject is in the eye and mind of the artist. I’m reminded of this whenever I look at the still life paintings of James Neil Hollingsworth, who I profiled in May of last year. Hollingsworth is an Atlanta based painter who has an uncanny knack for finding and portraying visual drama in the most humble of subjects.

Look at this wonderful painting of a single ripe tomato. Even within the limits of a square format (in itself a challenge), Hollingsworth has placed his subject dead center, which usually deadens a composition, and managed to build a swirling yin-yang of dark and light around it, roiling the shadows of the tablecloth’s folds like waves or a mountainous landscape, and using the dark background and backlit modeling of the tomato to push it into high relief.

The tomato itself is an instruction manual in the dramatic use of light and shadow to define a spheroidal form, and a textbook for the use of ambient, local and reflected color. Just look at the stem, simultaneously revealed and hidden as if it were the edge of a dark forest, bits of cast shadow reinforcing the roundness of the tomato’s form, and defined with magically lost and found edges, as in the body of the tomato, where dark touches dark and light touches light, areas where a less confident painter might feel compelled to always force sharp contrasts of light against dark to define an edge.

In addition to placing the subject in the very center of the composition, the horizon created by the tablecloth and background is almost vertically centered, the dark and light areas are almost 50-50, and the viewing angle is straight on. Hollingsworth manages to take all of these Composition 101 no-no’s and spin them into a little wonder of theatrical lighting and brilliantly focused color.

I doubt very much that the artist was thinking that way when composing the piece, he was probably just thinking “I’ll paint a tomato.” and let his eye, trained over years of finding the drama in simple subjects, do the rest.

Since I last wrote about Hollingsworth, he has added to his online galleries, with considerable new work in the Still Life gallery, and a new series of “Six by Six” paintings of which the image above is one. You will also find his older series of transparent and reflective objects, of which I am particularly fond, as well as several other categories of subject matter.

Hollingsworth now has a blog, Paintings in Oil, on which he displays his most recent work and discusses his process. Neil Hollingsworth is married to Karen Hollingsworth, who I profiled here, another strong painter with a terrific grasp of visual drama within subjects normally seen as subdued (check out her “Windowscapes” and “Roomsapes”).

As much as I like many of Neil’s various categories of subject matter, I keep coming back to his simple, intimate still life paintings, their subjects dramatically unveiled as light pours over them like honey.

So to the age-old question, “Where do I find a dramatic painting subject?”, the answer, if you’re Neil Hollingsworth, is “almost anywhere”.