Born to Endless Night

“Born to Endless Night: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints by William Blake Selected by John Frame” runs concurrent with “ Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame” on view in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery, March 12–June 27, 2011

John Frame says he was influenced heavily as a young artist by the works of Shakespeare and the illustrations and writings of William Blake; both figure deeply into the current project on display in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery at The Huntington, “Three Fragments of a Lost Tale.” Running concurrent with that exhibition is a display of a small group of The Huntington’s works by Blake, hand selected by Frame. The display, installed in the Works on Paper Room of the Huntington Art Gallery, provides a window into the world that inspires Frame in his art making process.

Frame wrote the Blake display’s label text, provided below.

Discovering Blake in my early twenties, I was drawn immediately into a world that was both charming and unsettling, and a body of work that comprised both literature—which was my primary study at the time—and visual art, where I was to find my own life’s work. Blake was a poet, a painter, an eccentric, and an unorthodox theologian. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, who confined themselves largely to portraits of the wealthy, landscapes, and decorative pieces, he grappled always with the basic questions of human life. “Prayer is the study of art. Praise is the practice of art,” he said, and, pursuing this dictum, he fashioned a world that was wholly his own and yet reached beyond himself toward God. Through imagination, he believed, you accessed the Divine; in the act of creation you realized your purpose as a human being. Blake’s insights have in many ways shaped my own approach to art making, and, no matter how frequent my journeys into his world, I have never failed to find there new wisdom, fresh beauty.

Illustrations for the “Book of Job”
In this series of beautifully composed illustrations, Blake explores the questions posed by the Book of Job. How is it that terrible things happen to people who are not only good themselves but who believe in the goodness of God? And, perhaps more perplexing, how do some of these people endure their agony and yet retain their love for the God who allowed it? Each illustration begins with a particular  episode in Job's life (the destruction of his children) and becomes a meditation on larger themes (the power of darkness upon man, who must endure tragedies not of his own making). I find these questions—and Blake's illustration of them—to be illogical and mysterious, difficult and essential.