Print, poetry and the Romantic imagination: Barbara Hanrahan and William Blake

Then tell me, what is the material world, and is it dead?’
He laughing answer’d: I will write a book on leaves of flowers,
If you will feed me on love-thoughts, & give me now and then
A cup of sparkling poetic fancies; so, when I am tipsie,
I’ll sing to you to this soft lute; and shew you all alive
The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.

William Blake, Europe a prophecy (1794)[1]

There are some artists we are lucky to find. Those who hold up a mirror, who force the heart to leap in recognition. Barbara Hanrahan admired many artists throughout her life, some fleetingly, others more enduringly. She loved the work of the modern mystic Cecil Collins, the sinuous wood engravings of Gertrude Hermes and Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘mysterious’ gardens with ‘black and white patterns flung meticulously down’.[2] In an interview with Julie Mott she would say: ‘I like to have a set of heroes in my mind – examples to test myself against’.[3] William Blake was key among them. He was not, however, an artist against whom she measured herself as much as a figure who sustained her. For Hanrahan, Blake’s work was both salve and influence; she recovered from early creative disappointments by escaping into his ‘company’ to again ‘feel’ herself ‘an artist’, and from her student days until the last years of her life, his poems appeared in her work as prompts or points of origin for the manifold images, rich and undulant, that bloomed beneath her hand.[4]

~

The first appearance of Blake in Hanrahan’s published diaries occurs in 1960, when she was aged 21, on Saturday 1 October: ‘I have some lovely library books. One called Charlotte and Emily, by Laura L. Hinkley, and others on [the] wood-engravings … of Blake and Dürer. The Blake one is very beautiful indeed.’[5]

Blake soon found his way into her work. In the early 1960s two prints, Dreamer and Dreaming woman (both 1961–62), declare Hanrahan’s affinity with dreaming states and the Romantic imagination. Dreaming woman is made in drypoint, a process in which a fine needle is used to directly scratch into a metal plate. The resulting delicate traceries and velvet burr form and encircle the woman, the dark scrawl at her head and furtive arcs at throat and breast suggesting a restless inner life. The print very nearly anticipates Hanrahan’s reaction to seeing Blake’s work years later, at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1989: ‘You see his scribbled passion of pencil lines, then the black pen drawing … they are all beautiful, wonderful’.[6]

In 1962 while a student at the South Australian School of Art, Hanrahan made several works with text and imagery drawn from Blake’s poems: Tyger! Tyger! and Ah sunflower (both 1962), which reference the Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789 and 1794), and To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower (1962), being the first lines of the ‘Auguries of Innocence’ (1863).

Hanrahan’s works were cut into linoleum and printed in black ink on white paper, a simpler method by which to incorporate text and image than Blake’s notoriously complex method of illuminated relief etching. Still, her Sunflower is a deceptively elaborate work. Linoleum is carved in a way that is rugged, yet fine and fluid, giving visual expression to a passage of wind, or perhaps the energy emitted by the sunflower itself. This wavering movement from left to right directs the eye towards the poem, while a hovering insect forms a delicate break between verses. The overall design appears to have been broadly influenced by Blake’s Songs but Hanrahan takes her own path. She extracts the work from its original place between Blake’s other poems, ‘The pretty rose tree’ and ‘The lilly’. She gives the sunflower space to grow. She connects the sky to the flower and its searching roots with a sequence of trembling lines. Text and image are held tautly within the confines of a border that serves to concentrate all within it – here is the evident creation of a world. Her work is a homage of a kind, but in it there is arguably some recognition of herself: the sunflower, symbol of the traveller and of one who searches. It would be a motif that appeared often in her work.

It is fascinating to consider how an artist comes to their medium, how it connects to or enhances the meaning of their work. For Blake, the methods of printmaking were entwined with spiritual exploration. He claimed that the process by which he printed his illuminated books and prophetic texts was imparted to him by his deceased brother in a vision.[7] In The marriage of heaven and hell (c.1790) he likened the caustic process of intaglio printing to an act of cleansing, allowing enhanced perception, writing that:

              first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives … melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, in-finite.[8]

Blake’s words would later be echoed by Hanrahan, who said: ‘When I began making prints … I felt I had sloughed the false “me” away and was in touch with the deepest part of my being which, in turn, was in touch with something so much greater than itself.’[9] Like Blake, the caustic process of intaglio, and by extension, the cutting of blocks, revealed to her a truer self within the broader context of an evolving, personal religion. In her diaries, too, she would define printmaking in sacred terms, describing the print workshop at the South Australian School of Art as her ‘spiritual home’, and an ‘ecstasy in my life’.[10] She wrote: ‘Printmaking … saved me – it was a retreat to focus all the poetry and spirituality inside me … My God was there … The techniques of the print room. Etching and lithography, woodcuts, linocuts. The beautiful traditions, hand-done.’[11] Later, she would go further, referring to the material aspects of the print as sentient: ‘[I] Love the breathing porous paper’[12]; of lithography: ‘The creamy limestone surface was so sensitive, it seemed a living thing’[13]; and of her final linocuts: ‘I hold my breath as I cut each one … there comes a stage in the cutting … when the image comes alive and the figures I am cutting become the people I love’.[14]

While Hanrahan was a gifted printmaker and technically adept, much of her work was achieved in collaboration with her partner, Jo Steele. Steele prepared her printing plates with great care and love, rounding sharp corners, trialling inks and preparing proofs as dark or as light as Hanrahan envisaged. Steele speaks eloquently of these delicate processes and of being attuned to their distinct behaviours: to the sound ink makes when warm enough to be rolled onto a plate; the point at which dampened paper is most receptive to an image; the laying-down of swanskin blankets to cosset plates from the force of printing. He uses the term ‘feedback’ to describe the looping rhythms of generative energy that pass between artist and medium. He describes, too, how Hanrahan would bow over her work intently, as though listening to the rhythm of its heart.[15]

Although Hanrahan was sometimes criticised for the ‘decorative’ quality of her art, her preference for binding minutiae into patterns of shifting rhythm often gives the impression that the surfaces of her image pulse, or rove like eyes.[16] Certainly, there is a life in her prints not evident in her paintings, the latter which she at one time referred to as ‘horrid’ and ‘smooth-skinned’, as though they were preserved, resembling life rather than embodying it.[17]

The eye of God I (1964) is a compelling early example of Hanrahan’s feeling for pattern, produced in her preferred medium of lithography. A work of delicate lines and moody blacks made in luscious touche ink, its picture plane is divided into seven sections and dramatically foreshortened. All elements are pressed close and bound together in the manner of a patchwork quilt: the sun and the moon, daisies, dandelions and a young woman, circle a large dark eye, around which the words ‘EYE – OF – GOD’ loop infinitely.

In Jerusalem the emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–c1820) Blake would write of ‘dilating eyes of plenty’ as ‘centres’, ‘cornucopias’, and of imagination as having infinite perception with ‘fourfold vision’ and being ‘Eyed as the Peacock’.[18] Hanrahan too, apprehends the eye as significant; not only is it the central element of her composition, but she also assigns eyes to the sun and the moon, and these successive round forms are echoed in the dandelion orb and flower pistil, gesturing towards an organic kind of repeat pattern. The literary critic Northrop Frye would refer to pattern in Blake’s work as a ‘unifying structure’; so too, Hanrahan uses pattern not as superficial ornament but to indicate the living connection between human, flora, fauna and cosmos.[19] The creeping plant that more tightly entwines each of the work’s elements was a motif also used by Blake to symbolise ‘the one life in all things’.[20] Hanrahan’s subsequent works, including Botanical man (1966) and Conversation with flowers (1974), feature human and hybrid figures formed and strewn with plants, their exaggerated almond eyes allowing something of Blake’s ‘fourfold vision’, and indicating Hanrahan’s preference, perhaps, for the infinite perception of imagination, as opposed to the comparative tunnel vision of rationality.

~

Blake would continue to feed and inflect Hanrahan’s work. After her cancer diagnosis, she wrote: ‘When I go into the radiography room for treatment I always take my Blake book with his Glad day on the cover. So that Albion aflame is always there with me as a beautiful symbol ...’[21] Her commitment to meditation as part of her treatment involved frequent trips to her instructors Ainslie Meares and Vere Langley in Melbourne, with another great flourishing of work after she joined the Victorian Print Workshop (now Australian Print Workshop) in October 1988.

Two etchings, Sun and moon and There is from great eternity … (both 1989) incorporate fragments of Blake’s prophetic text The Four Zoas (published posthumously in 1893) and ‘Auguries of innocence’ (1863). Hanrahan referred in her diaries to the latter work coming to her suddenly: ‘If the sun and the moon should doubt, they’d immediately go out … I thought of an etching – girl cocooned/surrounded by angels and that verse and the sun and the moon …’[22]

Images flow from Blake’s words in a downward-moving rush, while further fragments of his poems appear in both prints, as though text and image worked in ongoing concert, each compelling the other. While Hanrahan had often retained and embraced a folkish girlishness in her art, these images are wilfully naive, made more so by her acquiescence to the awkward gesture of pushing an etching needle through hard ground. Just prior to the production of these works, Hanrahan had, in September 1988, purchased Kathleen Raine’s study of William Blake, referring to it as her ‘new holy book’, from which she intended to read ‘each day’.[23] In it, Raine writes of Blake’s belief in ‘Childhood’ not as ‘a state of inexperience and ignorance’ but that ‘of pure being’.[24] It was a sentiment shared by Hanrahan, who said: ‘I think the truest part of you is the child, and the child is still in you all the time – it doesn’t matter how old you are in years …’[25]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s an abundance of wide-eyed, childlike angels appears in Hanrahan’s prints, their great wings flaring like candle flames. Angels had come to Blake in visions throughout his life, but they emerged more frequently in Hanrahan’s work as she contemplated the idea of death. In Angels and children (1989) a cluster of winged creatures with impossibly elastic, elongated bodies float in nebulous, horizonless space. Like Blake’s weightless figures, ‘leaping, running, flying’, which embodied ‘life – consciousness – [moving] freely where it wills’, Hanrahan’s angels are ‘immaterial beings occupying mental not physical space’.[26]

~

Some of Hanrahan’s final prints were made to illustrate Iris in Her Garden (1991), a book of eight short stories which centre around her grandmother, Iris, and her garden at 58a Rose Street, Thebarton. Small in scale, her etched illustrations are relief-printed in dark-green ink so that their drawings are cast against the shining white of paper. It is almost impossible to look at these images without recalling Blake’s similarly small and beautiful wood engravings for William Thornton’s Pastorals of Virgil (1821), a collection of illustrated pastoral poems for children. Hanrahan’s stories too, are pastorals of sorts, compelled and made ecstatic by the beauty of nature. In one story she would write:

My grandmother’s legs float higher; they’re patterned with veins and the stems of an unnatural garden: witch bell, star flower. She is a giant earth mother in the sky; she is the girl she used to be. Black shiny hair full of diamond-bright sun sparks, threaded with satin ribbon; sleepy almond eyes, forget-me-not blue; all the wrinkles gone away and she’s the goddess of the rainbow. She floats, she dissolves. She is just a great white cloud spread across the sky. Iris floating free over all the gardens of Rose Street.[27]

Hanrahan coalesces dream and memory to form a transcendent image of Iris, who appears in text and image among flowers and stars. Here is a world that is infinitely alive, a place in which ‘every particle of dust’ truly ‘breathes forth its joy’.[28]

[1] W. Blake, The Completed Illuminated Books, Thames & Hudson in association with the William Blake Trust, London, 2000, p. 191.

[2] B. Hanrahan, Kewpie Doll, Chatto & Windus, London, 1984, pp. 116–17.

[3] J. Mott, ‘Interview with Barbara Hanrahan’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1983, p. 40.

[4] B. Hanrahan, The Diaries of Barbara Hanrahan, E. Lindsay (ed.), University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld, 1998, p. 63.

[5] ibid., p. 21.

[6] ibid., p. 318.

[7] Blake, p. 9.

[8] ibid., p 120.

[9] Mott, p. 44.

[10] Hanrahan, The Diaries of Barbara Hanrahan, p. 63.

[11] ibid., p 323.

[12] ibid., p 183.

[13] Hanrahan, Kewpie Doll, p. 132.

[14] Hanrahan, The diaries of Barbara Hanrahan, p. 301.

[15] Author interview with Jo Steele, 26 March 2021.

[16] See Hanrahan, The Diaries of Barbara Hanrahan for perceived criticisms of the decorative nature of her work, pp. 138; see also Mott, p. 304.

[17] Hanrahan, The Diaries of Barbara Hanrahan, p. 183.

[18] E.J. Rose, ‘The symbolism of the opened centre and poetic theory in Blake’s Jerusalem’, Studies in English literature, 1500–1900, vol. 5, no. 4, Autumn, 1965, p. 594.

[19] N. Frye, ‘Poetry and design in William Blake’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 10, no. 1, September 1951, p. 41.

[20] K. Raine, William Blake, Thames & Hudson, London, 1970, p. 51.

[21] Hanrahan, The Diaries of Barbara Hanrahan, pp. 221–2.

[22] ibid., p. 312.

[23] ibid., p. 293.

[24] Raine, p. 51.

[25] Mott, p. 43.

[26] Raine, p. 51.

[27] B. Hanrahan, Iris in Her Garden, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1992, p. 59.

[28] Blake, p. 191.