"The crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white" is one of the Proverbs of Hell by William Blake: painter, poet, engraver, revolutionary, visionary.
Born in 1757 in London, he worked as an apprentice for an engraver and studied at the Royal Academy of Art. Throughout his life he saw image and text as a whole, invented a new engraving technique for his works and earned his living with illustrations. In his writings and paintings he celebrated, anachronistically, imagination, ecstacy and energy and was considered by his contemporaries and for a long time to come—to be ingenious but quite mad. He died impoverished and, according to the legend, singing joyously on 12th April 1827 in London.
The Proverbs of Hell, which constitute the core of his illustrated book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , are exemplary for Blakes's criticism of organised religion and satirize the Book of Proverbs and King Salomo's concepts of good and evil, blessing and curse, discipline and excess. The fear of the lord, for example, is contrasted with individual creative power, the ritual sacrifices of the old testament with respect of the human being for the animal. Blake sees contrasts as neccessary tensions, which the human being needs to realise his/her divine potential.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
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