http://www.ashmolean.org/events/SpecialEvents/?id=148

In the Footsteps of Blake

William Blake Exhibition Event

With Nick Owen, poet

Saturday 28 February, 11.00 a.m. –12.30 p.m.

The pairing together of poetry and illustration has never been as inspiring or revolutionary as that seen in the work of William Blake. With the digital tools we have today it is easier for us follow in his footsteps and connect writing with images. Poet Nick Owen will discuss these works of art and encourage you to make your own illustrated poetry. Tickets £5/£4 concessions.

Tickets £5/£4 concessions. Booking is essential. Click here to book online now.

This will be a Powerpoint presentation on the development of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and pictures from the inspiring work of William Blake. The emphasis will be on connecting visual art with the written word and poetry.

It will also look backwards to much earlier connections between visual and linguistic codes in Egypt and China.

There will be references to the latest developments in multi-media self expression as well as an examination of the work of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and Pre-Raphaelites.

Blake will be seen as an inspiration both in terms of philosophy and psychology as well as the developments he inspired in poetry and the visual arts.

Extract from Poetry and pictures manifesto below

(From the earliest days of printing, a world of visual images with associated thought and feeling, juxtaposed with text has been part of the western way of enculturation, to help in the process of translating meaningless ciphers, squiggles on a page, into the stuff of inner experience, into understood written words, leaping from the page or screen into constructs of a mental world.

I will never forget the moment when words and images entwined and danced for me as I began to understand written text for the first time. It was like the moment when stumbling and sinking transform into skiing and swimming as learning transforms to achieving.

The real father of Poetry and Pictures as a genre has to be William Blake, a visual artist by trade, and one of the greatest poets in the English language. More recently, the last poet laureate, Ted Hughes, set the ball rolling for modern artists with his book, “The Remains of Elmet”. He wrote poems specifically for a photographer’s art works here. In a second book, “River”, he juxtaposed poetry with an artist’s photographs without connecting them more intimately.

Hughes only wrote the poetry. He collaborated with others to create these poem-picture works. We are encouraging such collaborative work, and are open to both photographers and poets, but we are mostly focused on creating a combined work made by one author. “Poetry and Pictures” is, I believe, the first attempt to establish the two arts together as a genre for the twenty first century.

Photography has always struggled to establish its credentials as an Art form in its own right. Poetry in turn, has struggled to make a case that it is still relevant to this fast changing world. Much modern writing is as uninspiring as a snapshot from a cheap digital camera. I believe that combining ideas expressed visually with ideas expressed in words can make for a powerful medium of expression, both folk art and high art. The idea is to link a poem with a picture or series of pictures. The two can also blend together into a single visual image, which is both poetry and photography. I am not sure how many variations on the overall theme will emerge. Already there are versions I had not dreamed about. I find the merging of words into visual art in graphic artistry a particularly inspiring form. Poetry condenses experience. A photographer or graphic artist can do the same with a visual image.)