William Blake, David Delivered out of Many Waters c.1805. Tate.
This display focuses on William Blake and several of his contemporaries. All artists used the human figure to explore
intense emotional states
In the eighteenth century, figure drawing was the basis of artistic training. Most of the artists in this room studied or taught at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Students had to start by copying casts of ancient sculpture. Only later could they draw live models. Accurately depicting an observed figure was a prized skill. It was essential for painters of portraits and historical and narrative subjects.
These artists studied human form, movement, character and expression. But they applied this knowledge to unconventional, visionary scenes. Gods, heroes, demons and monsters populate their drawings and prints. These arose from their imaginations and from highly personal readings of myth, literature and history. As well as looking to the art of the past, they used topical incidents as inspiration. They caricatured, exaggerated and transformed contemporary public figures. The results are funny, grotesque and sometimes disturbing.
Paul Pfeiffer, Morning After the Deluge 2003
Morning After the Deluge is a large-scale, single-projection video installation, preferably presented in a dedicated room where the projected image is directed onto a free-standing screen. The work features two pieces of real-time footage that the artist filmed in Cape Cod, Massachusetts – one a sunset over the Atlantic Ocean and the other a sunrise on Cape Cod Bay – that are merged together and presented on a continual loop. As the sun slowly disappears into the ocean on one side, it rises out of the water on the other. In this new arrangement, the usual figure-ground relationship is upended: the sun becomes a fixed point at the centre of the image while the horizon line becomes unfixed, slowly wandering across the frame from top to bottom.
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artworks in Poetical Bodies: Works on Paper by Blake and His Contemporaries
Art in this room
Paul Pfeiffer
Morning After the Deluge
2003