Smith’s Opus
Picked up Barry Windsor Smith: Opus Volume 1 from the library on Saturday. A more detailed examination of his work that heavily reminds me of William Blake’s works…particularly Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.
I was in…gosh…New York I think?…and this museum had a startling retrospective of Blake’s work including many of the actual plates he used to etch out poems and pictures.
Check out Blake’s books if you ever get a chance, handsome editions were published about 4/5 years ago, I think I bought one but I can’t find it (so fired).
Bonus Fun: Songs of Experience contain Blake’s famous poem “The Tyger” (“Tyger Tyger burning bright,/In the forests of the night:/What immortal hand or eye,/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”) which was beautifully evoked in the outstanding Spider-Man series Kraven’s Last Hunt (I’ll forever be disturbed by that image of Spider-Man coming out of his grave to my final end).
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Also published on Medium.