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Image Credit: Sophie Blackall via Flavorwire.com

Some "missed connections" ads have a life beyond Craigslist. Though only a small fraction may lead to actual rendezvous, dozens have found their way into the imagination of book illustrator Sophie Blackall, who published a collection of watercolor interpretations of these ads called Missed Connections: Love, Lost and Found (2011). Blackall's paintings imaginatively visualize the encounters that inspire people to write these heartfelt epistles on missed connection pages (the Internet's version of the proverbial bathroom wall). Her designs have been called "heartbreaking" and "comical" , "wonderful" and "whimsical" , and her book was featured on Oprah's website--a testament to its popular appeal. Presumably, Blackall's illustrations made a splash because they incorporate a delightful mix of the real and the ideal, yoking artifacts of modern life to images of pure fantasy in a style reminiscent of Blackall's artwork for children. 

Image Credit: Sophie Blackall via Flavorwire.com

Some would say they infuse the mundane with the magic of a quest romance.  Many of her pieces play with elements of the supernatural (don't the bear people above look like followers of Circe or Spenser's Acrasia?); others include idealized portraits of a pursued hero or heroine (see Long Curly Brown Hair above); and sometimes they picture the hapless pursuer himself (see the man with a yellow scarf, below). 

But more than simply evoking hallmarks of the romance tradition, Blackall's illustrations tap into anxieties about seeing the object of one's love without knowing or feeling it, and vice versa (knowing without seeing).  This disjunction between vision and knowledge is essential to the basic missed connection storyline: a man catches a tantalizing glimpse of a beautiful stranger, and is haunted by the fact that she will never know how he feels. "I found you stunningly beautiful but you'll probably never know,"  Long Curly Brown Hair's admirer writes.

Image Credit: Sophie Blackall via Flavorwire.com

This focus on the disconnect between individuals' visual impression of each other and their real intimacy may also be seen as commenting on actual romantic relationships, not just those that are fantasized about on the missed connections page. More specifically, Blackall's pictures seem to engage with relationships that are distancing, or those that lack emotional "glue." It seems significant that the individuals in each of the couples above are obstructed from seeing or communicating with eachother (one pair is obstructed by a bear's head, the other by the fact that the figures are both sleeping). It's possible to read these obstructions as figuring different social and psychological phenomena that are coming between us.

Interestingly, vision, looking, and watching are some of the main faculties we use in our online love lives.  Social-networking tools like Facebook have made it increasingly easy to see others without being seen (think of the last time you discreetly [pre]viewed a love interest online). This tendency to monitor or "stalk" others online has arguably created barriers to making real-life connections. Knowing that almost everyone is on Facebook, for instance, may reduce our incentive to be memorable or bold in person (because we know we can look them up later) or it may cause us to form negative preconceptions about people before we ever speak to them.  Blackall's pictures seem to be in dialogue with these kinds of issues.

I will now take this blog post in an unexpected, if not improbable, direction: to the poetry and illustrations William Blake.  Few people would associate Blackall's soft, velvety paintings with Blake's muscular engravings.  Yet, I want to suggest that Blackall's work--though disimilar to Blake in its technique--sometimes exhibits a Blakean perspective on vision and love. The basis for this claim may be discerned in a few plates of Blake's 1793 poem "Visions of the Daughters of Albion." The poem undertakes the gigantic task of exposing the human toll of empire, and the perversity of its social institutions.  On another level, though, it is simply about the emotional distance between unseeing lovers.

Image Credit: Copy O, c. 1818 (British Museum), William Blake Archive

The poem's epigraph, "The Eye sees more than the Heart knows," can be read as expressing the dilemma of Blackall's modern romantic: s/he is a socially-networked spectator of partners; but she is emotionally isolated, with a heart that doesn't know them.

Image Credit: Copy O, c. 1818 (British Museum), William Blake Archive

In the plate above, Oothoon and Bromion on the left seem to touch, but only through their mutual chains. They gaze in opposite directions while Theotormon, the third member of this connected but disconnected love triangle, stubbornly gazes navel-ward.  The three figures crouch on the threshold of vision with no hope of ever gaining it (a sun-eyeball hangs tauntingly over the water in the background).  Blackall's yellow skarf boy (above) who writes that he "wanted to apologize for [his] repeated lack of consciousness onto [the sleeping girl's] shoulder" could, I think, belong to this unconscious group. His message will never reach the girl, and she never knew he admired her in the first place. The Long Curly Brown Hair girl, too, has a place on Blake's sandbank.  Her identity (and her hair) is trapped like the tragic group in a threshold of vision--trapped between two eye-like windows and the blink of her admirer's eyelids.  He writes, "I watched as you stepped between closing doors and disappeared." The admirer, the artist, and we (the painting's viewers) can only know the Long Curly Brown Hair girl as an object of sight, and as Blake would warn us, this vision of love is far too narrow. 

Image Credit: Copy P, c. 1818 (Fitzwilliam Museum), William Blake Archive