William Blake
b. 1991, Oshkosh, WI
For his second exhibition with Gallery Victor Armendariz, William Blake presents A Great Battlefield, a collection of new paintings depicting US Marines at the Gettysburg National Military Park. A Great Battlefield, takes its title from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address which poetically looks to the battlefield as a site of rebirth. Following the tradition of nineteenth-century American history painting, Blake uses oil and linen to depict US Marines’ reenacting the 1922 Marine Corps at the Gettysburg battlefield. After the First World War, the Marine Corps hosted summer exercises and reenactments at Civil War battlefields. The largest and most attended of these events was the 1922 Gettysburg event which consisted of an accurate (no tanks, planes) reenactment of Pickett's Charge. In the summer of 2020, William Blake organized a reenactment in cooperation with the United States Marine Corps Historical Company. who posed for this series of paintings. Blake collapses histories and myths into a contemplative look at our Battlefield.
William Blake lives and works outside Chicago, IL. As a participant in Civil War reenactments across the country, he portrays the artist Winslow Homer. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he also holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He currently teaches Figure Drawing at Harper College. His work has been published in Fine Art Connoisseur, New American Paintings, The Chicago Tribune, and American Art Collector. He has been a resident artist at the Berkshire Painting Residency, the Vermont Studio Center, the Cuttyhunk Island Residency, and the Lincoln Legacy Residency.
