BEGINNINGS

British Museum
The Approach of Doom
Unique impression from Relief Etching
1787 or 1788

Blake was trained as an engraver. He used the tools of his trade to make intaglio engravings suitable for making prints of the of work of recognized artists. But to copy the work of other artists was not his aspiration. The way that he freed himself from the role of a craftsman, was by developing his own way of creating art. Apparently the print named The Approach of Doom represented one of his initial experiments with relief etching which opened his way to continued creativity. Although The Approach of Doom did not contain text it was soon followed by experiments in combining text with images. Blake did not dive right into creating Illuminated Books, he proceeded step by step along a path which would give expression to his latent talents.

Next Blake produced two little books of aphorisms, using the relief etching technique and containing both text and images. The Wikipedia entry for There is No Natural Religion notes that Peter Ackroyd pointed our that, "his newly invented form now changed the nature of his expression. It had enlarged his range; with relief etching, the words inscribed like those of God upon the tables of law, Blake could acquire a new role." 

Wikipedia Commons
There is No Natural Religion
1788

Joseph Viscomi in an article published on Branch Collective website wrote:

"For the rest of his life, Blake practiced a “re-creational” aesthetic, in which returning to one of his own plates, intaglio or relief etching, provided opportunities for new invention, either in reworking the plate and/or the manner in which it was printed or subsequently hand colored. As a printmaker, he had severed himself from convention, as he was about to do with poetry and would also do as a painter with the 1795 monoprints and subsequent “fresco” paintings. 1788 was a turning point for Blake, from professional line engraver with only two original prints to his name (plate 5 in the Royal Universal Family Bible, 1782 and the frontispiece to Thomas Commin’s An Elegy, 1786), both conventionally designed and executed, to avant-garde graphic artist. From hereon, he began thinking differently, more expansively, about printmaking, poetry, and painting, and he began his life-long willingness to experiment with forms, styles, and materials regardless of media. Blake could work autographically with pen, brush, and ink directly on a plate as poet and painter to create printable illustrated manuscripts corresponding to no models or mock-ups. He could work without models and without the expectation of exact repeatable images and thus he could improvise and recreate upon reprinting. His new medium contributed far more to his creative work and idea of himself as artist than the creation of any variant of stereotyping could have done. The technical problem he solved was how to reproduce autographic marks and not how to print letters from plates. Once he realized he could use his new printmaking method as painter and poet, he began to think up book projects for it, and thus to think also as publisher. He began to think in terms no poet or artist did before him. He began creating untranslatable pictorial poetry." 

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Descriptive Catalog, (E 527) 

 "The execution of my Designs, being all in Water-colours,
(that is in Fresco) are regularly refused to be exhibited by the
Royal Academy, and the British Institution has, 
this year, followed its example, and has effectually excluded me 
by this Resolution; I therefore invite those Noblemen and 
Gentlemen, who are its Subscribers, to inspect what they have 
excluded: and those who have been told that my Works are
but an unscientific and irregular Eccentricity, a Madman's
Scrawls, I demand of them to do me the justice to examine before
they decide.
  There cannot be more than two or three great Painters or
Poets in any Age or Country; and these, in a corrupt state of
Society, are easily excluded, but not so easily obstructed.  They
have excluded Watercolours; it is therefore become necessary
that I should exhibit to the Public, in an Exhibition of my own,
my Designs, Painted in Watercolours.  If Italy is enriched and
made great by RAPHAEL, if MICHAEL ANGELO is its supreme glory, if
Art is the glory of a Nation, if Genius and Inspiration are the
great Origin and Bond of Society, the distinction my Works have
obtained from those who best understand such things, calls for my
Exhibition as the greatest of Duties to my Country. 

May 15. 1809
                                             WILLIAM BLAKE"

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Dino Franco Felluga
"I started BRANCH because I felt there was a real need for a free, expansive, searchable, reliable, peer-reviewed, easy-to-use resource for the study of nineteenth-century history and culture, one that went significantly beyond what one can find at Wikipedia."