Artist Annette Messager and William Blake

In an excerpt of her book, "In my View," on Huffington Post, French artist Annette Messager reflects on how William Blake influences her work:

Blake is, for me, both a child and an old man. "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" — the child who marvels at everything and the man tortured throughout his life by mystical insights, death, decay and pessimism. The true artist! He said: "The imagination is not a state. It is the human existence itself."

Blake’s drawings are both joyful and melancholic, light and sad. His works — text and images — become interwoven poetically into his poems. The game that he plays between words and images also makes me think of Edward Lear’s very funny Nonsense rhymes and pictures, which I love. This complete world has always stimulated me.

I feel that Blake does not seem to relate to a particular period or a specific time — in the same way that children’s drawings or artworks made by ‘outsider’ artists seem not to. But at the same time Blake was a visionary. His work is beyond time. It is beyond past, present and future.

Find full post and a slideshow of Blake's art here.