To accompany last week's reading of One Friday a couple of weeks ago, I was artist in residence at Linton Heights School in Cambridgeshire, and had the wonderful opportunity of introducing William Blake to about 180 children. They loved him! I began each session by reading The Tyger, and encouraged them to listen, not just with their brains, but with their whole being.
Painting and poetry is a full body experience, I told them, and they were a joy as they had genuine responses of wonder, excitement, curiosity, bewilderment and surprise. They brought their sketchbooks with them and I am sure William Blake would have loved the weird and wonderful images they drew. I encouraged them to react from their deep imagination, not their mind, and that there was no right or wrong way to respond. What a joy children are.
Notes
Linda Richardson is an artist. Based in Cambridge, England, she makes work that engages the imagination and intuition and tries to make a creative space for the viewer to connect their inner nature with their outer nature to form ideas that are not rooted in convention, reason or rationality. However neither are they pure fantasy that provides an escape from humdrum life. Linda wants instead to awaken the senses to the beauty and wonder of the world in which we live, to activate the attention to the mystery of the human experience.
Here is the painting that Linda shared with the class at Linton Heights School, inspired by Blake’s poem, as seen in the photograph above.
You can find more of Linda’s work at lindarichardson.net
We shared actor’s Matt Ray Brown’s reading of The Tyger here, as part of Matt’s exclusive series for Finding Blake — filmed at William Blake’s home on South Molton Street, London.
More realistic than the one Blake did himself! What medium did you use Linda?
Hello Eric. I started with acrylic because it dries quickly and I wanted to start and finish it in the time I was with the children. I finished it in oil. You can put oil over acrylic but not the other way round.