William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“a colour gets its brilliance or its depth from being in light or in shadow” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “His praise of a severe art had been beyond price had his age rested a moment to listen”
  2. “Excess is the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark, embalming spice of the finest art.”
  3. “Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; and all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.”
  4. “now he wrote, ‘O glory, and O delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous fiend to his station’–he had overcome the merely reasoning and sensual portion of the mind–‘whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last twenty years of my life….”
  5. “yet in his visionary realism, and in his enthusiasm for what, after all, is perhaps the greatest art, and a necessary part of every picture that is art at all, he forgot how he who wraps the vision in lights and shadows, in iridescent or glowing colour, having in the midst of his labour many little visions of these secondary essences, until form be half lost in pattern, may compel the canvas or paper to become itself a symbol of some not indefinite because unsearchable essence”