Friday, June 12, 2009

One Man's Revelation is Another Man's Hearsay


..."All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
- Thomas Paine, The AGE of REASON

Yesterday afternoon while sitting in the back of Isac Artzi's E-Business and Marketing class, I doodled a portrait of Thomas Paine, based on the Wikipedia image of the man, (which is a reproduction of a posthumous oil portrait housed in the National Portrait Gallery in London). According to the Wikipedia Commons entry the portrait was painted in 1880 by Auguste Millière after an engraving by William Sharp, after a 1792 portrait by George Romney. So my rendering is at least four times removed from its Revolutionary subject.
...I had been reading from Paine's book The Age of Reason
a day or so previous, and he and his works were on my mind. The Age of Reason is a worthy, lucid treatise in which Thomas Paine explains his views on religion, and in my most humble opinion, study of it would benefit us all, especially in light of the way we are being constantly barraged with propaganda designed to make us feel threatened by someone elses ideas about religion, economics, or anything. ...According to legend, Paine fled to France from London, at the urging of his friend William Blake, who was himself to be tried for sedition later on. Not only did the officers of King George III consider Paine a traitor, but apparently a number of English Tories still feel that way today. My advice to them is: Get Over It.
...The picture I post here was drawn this morning, using my yesterday's sketch
as a reference.
The William Blake Archive

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