Vision + Verse series

In _Vision + Verse_, James McGrath explores the legacy of William Blake by embedding Blake’s original drawings into 3D-rendered environments of simulated cloth. The cloth doesn’t merely surround the figure—it becomes it. As the compositions unfold, the human form dissolves into drapery, suggesting that poetic inheritance is not a direct lineage but a process of absorption, transformation, and eventual erasure. This act of visual substitution echoes Harold Bloom’s concept of “misprision”—creative influence as distortion. Blake’s religious and mythological figures are not faithfully preserved, but reinterpreted through layered, image-rich surfaces. The works, mounted on Plexiglas, shimmer with a dense interplay of texture, transparency, and form. McGrath’s panels refuse fixed categorization. They are neither traditional painting nor pure digital output, but hybrid surfaces where historical material is folded into new visual systems. The result is an evocative, tactile reinterpretation of Blake—not as an icon to be revered, but as a source to be re-read, re-formed, and ultimately re-embodied through cloth.