William Blake, Title page to 'Songs of Innocence' (1789) I talked in the previous post about writers who drew, or painted, and I suggested some reasons about why writers would deviate into visual art. What about artists who write? For some reason, there are comparatively few artists who turned to writing in the same way that writers turned to art. Maybe if you go back to Renaissance Italy, you find painters and sculptors who wrote poetry as part of their cultivation of a rounded personality. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo wrote sonnets that are still anthologized: Michelangelo: Sonnet with marginal drawing Vasari, who wrote the unreliable but entertaining ‘Lives of the Artists’ was himself a painter. William Blake is perhaps the greatest example of an artist turned writer. He was apprenticed to a printer and ground out a living making reproduction prints for years, while writing poems in his notebooks. The version of ‘Songs of Innocence & Experience’ with his own h...
Artist Philip Hartigan talks about art, interviews other artists, and more