Evil In The Woods (1986)

Blake
Biography
The archetype of the Creator is a familiar image in the work of Blake. Here, the figure Urizen demiurgic requests before the world he has forged. The Song of Los is the third in a series of illuminated manuscripts painted by Blake and his wife, known collectively as the Continental Prophecies.
William Blake was born at 28 Broad Street, London, England November 28, 1757, a middle class family. It was the third of seven children, two of whom died in infancy. Blake's father, James, was a hosier. William never attended school, and was educated at home by his mother Catherine Wright Blake Armitage. The Blakes were Dissenters, and are believed to have belonged to the Moravian Church. The Bible was an early and profound influence on Blake, and will remain a source of inspiration throughout his life.
Blake began engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities purchased for him by his father, a practice that was then preferred to actual development. In these drawings Blake found his first exposure to classical forms through the work of Raphael, Michelangelo, Marten Heemskerk and Albrecht Drer. His parents knew enough of his headstrong temperament that he was not sent to school, but was instead enrolled in drawing classes. He read avidly on subjects of their choice. During this time, Blake was also making explorations into poetry, his early work displays knowledge of Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser.
Learning Basire
On August 4, 1772, Blake became an apprentice engraver James Basire Great Queen Street, for seven years. At the end of this period, at the age of 21, he became a professional engraver. No record survives of serious disagreement or conflict between the two during the learning period of Blake. However, Peter Ackroyd's biography notes that Blake was later to add the name to a list of Basire adversariesnd artistic and scratching. That aside, the style of engraving Bazire was likely to be held in the old at the time, and training of Blake in this form may have been outdated detrimental to its acquisition or recognition of work in later life.
After two years Basire sent his apprentice to copy images of Gothic churches in London (it is possible that this task has been created to break up a quarrel between Blake and James Parker, his apprentice boy) and his experiences in the Abbey Westminster contributed to the formation of his artistic style and ideas, the abbey of his time has been decorated with armor, painted funeral effigies and colored wax. Ackroyd notes that "the] most immediate impression [was the brightness and color fading. In the afternoon, Blake spent sketches of the Abbey, he was occasionally interrupted by the boys of Westminster School , one of them "tormented" Blake so one afternoon when he hit the boy a scaffold to land "on which he fell with a terrible violence". Blake saw visions over the abbey, a great procession of monks and priests, while he has heard "singing the chant and choral.
The Royal Academy
On October 8, 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset House, near the Strand. Although the terms of his study did not ask for payment, it is expected to provide its own equipment during the period of six years. There, he rebelled against what he saw as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens, championed by the first president of the school, Joshua Reynolds. Over time, Blake came to detest Reynolds' attitude to art, especially his quest for "universal truth" and "general beauty. Reynolds wrote in his speech that the provision "to abstractions, generalizations and classification, is the greater glory of the human spirit" Blake responded, in marginalia to his personal copy, that "to generalize is to be an idiot to particularize is the alone distinction of merit. "