Dream Logic: The Video

Video of my art. Music by Spank City

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Surrealism Page Added & Other News

I added a Surrealism page to this web site. It has some old work and a new image or two, it’s just a good collection of surrealist images I’ve produced in the past few years.

My sister Lauren updated her web site with a bunch of great new oil paintings after training with Odd Nerdrum.

There’s also surrealistic and cool art iPhone wallpapers free for the taking… yay!

I’m also trying out tumblr which is a microblogging service quite a bit more full featured than twitter. For instance you can have videos and images… though the posts are still meant to be relatively small.

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Rachel: Time & Decay

Surrealist nude female figure expressing time and decay

Surrealist nude female figure expressing time and decay

I finally got a decent picture of this model finished.

Most of the pictures I made from this photoshoot received little acclaim. Richard Fishman actually liked this image!

Yay!!

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Can you be a Surrealist and NOT be in the Surrealist Movement?

My “Dada and Surrealism” professor made the distinction between Surrealists and surrealists. According to him, the people who were deemed to be in the surrealist movement at any given time (by Andre Breton) were surrealists, and the people who weren’t in the movement weren’t surrealists, even if their work was surreal.
I like the professor, but sometimes these academic arguments, are, well academic. (In the pedantic sense of the word.)

Take this for example:

sur-re-al-ism
n.
1. A 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious and is characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter.
2. Literature or art produced in this style.

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/surrealism)

or

sur-re-al
adj.
1. Having qualities attributed to or associated with surrealism: “Even with most facilities shut down … a few mavericks managed to slip into the park to sample the almost surreal emptiness before the shutdown ended.” Peter H. King.
2. Having an oddly dreamlike quality.

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/surreal)

Well, those words seem to mean a style of art, second to the movement, and with good reason.

What else is there to call artwork that have the qualities of a dream?

According to Andre Breton you don’t have to be in the movement to be a surrealist:

Rimbaud is a surrealist in the way he lived, and elsewhere. // Jarry is a surrealist in absinthe.

Andre Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism” p 27.

Rimbaud died in 1891 and Jarry died in 1907.

They were both dead before the movement started.

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Blue Room Show

Two more pieces are going up in a show at the Blue Room at Brown University.

“Dark River” and “Dream Logic” are going to be in it.

Below: “Dream Logic”

Dream Logic

Below: “Dark River”

Dark River

Big thanks to Caroline Washington.

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Motion Graphics: An Unmasking

Motion Graphics: an unmasking

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Creating Automatic Drawings

What is an automatic drawing?

Automatic drawing was invented by Austin Osman Spare in the early 1900′s but the surrealists received the credit for it, according to most mainstream art historians.

Artists create automatic drawings by unconsciously drawing: they are not trying to do anything in particular; they watch the pencil in their hand moving on the paper and watch what evolves.

There are two schools of thought for how this works:

  • Psychological: the unconscious controls the hand movement and images buried within the psyche are revealed.

&

  • Mystical: the artist channels a spirit or force that controls his/her hand movements.

Whichever works better for the artist in producing the image is fine.
Comparing Spare’s art, or Dali’s sketches with some of the more widely celebrated modernist alternatives (in prestigious circles) or an utterly brilliant marketer’s–like Picasso–the more eccentric (and just plain weird) beliefs produce more interesting work, when the artist has skill.
An alternative explanation to the mystical school is that when an artist totally believes that s/he is transcending his/herself, the unconscious will more fully act to produce results; something outside the artist is larger and more powerful than just trying to call upon a part within him or her.
Also, the self conviction of an eccentric idea will produce an altered state that will be more conducive to unconscious activities like automatic drawing.

How to create automatic drawings

  • Ignore your conscious mind or turn it off.
  • Allow yourself to make random marks and see what comes out through serendipity.
  • When you see a few lines and notice they resemble a face or something else, you can continue to add details.
  • If nothing happens or you’re trying too hard to not do anything, it won’t happen, just start doodling. It’s like trying too hard to remember something you forgot: it’s better to do something else. Just experience it, and be in the experience without thought or judgment. The more you do something, the more unconscious that activity becomes, so if it’s not happing, begin drawing anyway.
  • Be light-hearted about it. You can’t do it wrong. There is no downside. Have fun.
  • Again, have fun! The more you enjoy it whether you’re doing it “right” or not the more you’re going to get better at it. “You can pretend anything and master it.” (Credit: hypnotist Milton Erickson)

The Unconscious
Hypnotists used to put a client in trance and then spend one to two hours just trying to get a deep trance phenomenon like arm catalepsy (holding the arm up in the air) before doing any actual trance work with the client.
Today great hypnotists like Richard Bandler will take the client’s arm and hold it up and tell them “Not to put it down until…” and if they start to let it drop tell them hold it up until their unconscious has worked on this thing. Who has time today to do it the other way?
John La Valle told a story of sitting there, while Richard had hypnotized him, thinking “this is stupid, I’m going to put my arm down,” and trying to, but being unable to.

On Unconscious Behavior
It’s when you’re driving, and suddenly realize you’ve already arrived at the destination and don’t remember getting there, where were you? You were there and driving safely. Barbara Stepp calls this a driving trance.
Unconscious behavior is the rule, not the exception.
Automatic drawing is actually quite easy, easier than people think. The more we as humans engage in any activity, the less conscious is becomes.
Automatic drawing is simply about tossing aside the intermediary of consciousness between the art and the source of one’s creativity.

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On Symbolism

Symbolism
From Wikipedia

Symbolism was a late nineteenth century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts.

Precursors and origins

Symbolism was largely a reaction against Naturalism and Realism, movements which attempted to capture reality in its particularity. These movements invited a reaction in favor of spirituality, the imagination, and dreams; the path to Symbolism begins with that reaction.

//

Distinct from the Symbolist movement in literature, Symbolism in art represents an outgrowth of the more gothic and darker sides of Romanticism; but where Romanticism was impetuous and rebellious, Symbolist art was static and hieratic.

Movement

The Symbolist Manifesto

Symbolists believed that art should aim to capture more absolute truths which could only be accessed by indirect methods. Thus, they wrote in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. The Symbolist manifesto (�Le Symbolisme�, Le Figaro, 18 Sept 1886) was published in 1886 by Jean Mor�as. Mor�as announced that Symbolism was hostile to “plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description,” and that its goal instead was to “clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form” whose “goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal”:

In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.

//
In painting, Symbolism was a continuation of some mystical tendencies in the Romantic tradition, which included such artists as Caspar David Friedrich, Fernand Khnopff and John Henry Fuseli and it was even more closely aligned with the self-consciously dark and private movement of Decadence.

//

The Symbolist painters mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul, seeking evocative paintings that brought to mind a static world of silence. The symbols used in Symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, the Symbolist painters influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau movement and Les Nabis. In their exploration of dreamlike subjects, symbolist painters are found across centuries and cultures, as they are still today; Bernard Delvaille has described Rene Magritte’s surrealism as “Symbolism plus Freud”.

I love Symbolist art the most out of any genre, and though I’m not sure about the aims of those artists to “clothe the ideal in perceptible forms” which is “only accessible through indirect means,” (that sounds almost dogmatic) I am interested in some of the more esoteric topics, but simply put, I love art that depicts fantasy worlds.

It comes down to that. That whether it’s a few of Dali’s paintings, or Magritte’s, or Jacek Yerka, I love dream worlds, fantasy worlds, the inexplicable, painted in a way that looks as if you could almost walk into that reality.

To really get into that sort of work I have to feel like there’s something below the surface; a girl with fairy-wings in a forest may look nice, but I have to wonder about it. When you really get curious about a picture and want to know more about that world, you’ve hit the “hook point.”

It’s analogous to the hook in a good song, or a bad commercial. You get the melody in your mind and your brain starts to play it over and over. I’ve heard that referred to as “brain-itch.” But that sounds like someone needs some ointment or at least a different description for that.

In a good picture it’s that part where the artist gives you just enough that you want more but not too much that everything is explained.

And then the artist gets the question; “…but what does it mean?” I haven’t found a good answer to that.

Recently I’ve been alternating between:

  • If I could say it, I wouldn’t have to make the picture.
  • What do you think it means?

Often artists make pictures because we don’t have the words.

If you can think of any other good answers to “what does it mean?” let me know.

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Dali's use of language in "On Modern Art"

Dali uses a number of techniques frequently throughout On modern art, to achieve his surrealistic style and tone. Some of these are (1) surrealist logic, (2) metaphor, and (3) paradox and reversal.
In his surrealist logic, his reasoning does not logically lead from one point to another, it just leaps from premise to assertion, or from assertion to assertion without any tight linear connection, and certainly without a deductive connection. His work still maintains a unity through an over-the-top tone. In part this tone is achieved through the flamboyant use of adjectives and concepts that is his trademark.
He uses unexpected metaphors though out the book to prove points.
He uses paradox and reversal often, both of which are common in comedy. Often in the case of his use of paradox he exploits the fact that all generalizations destroy themselves at some point in time–including that one. Reversal is when you think the story is going one way and then an amusing twist switches where you thought you were going to somewhere completely different.

Examples

  • Surrealistic logic: “Everyone knows that intelligence only leads us into a fog of skepticism, that its chief effect is to reduce us to factors having a gastronomical and supergelatinous, Proustian and gamely uncertainty.” (pg. 9)
  • Paradox: “… any attempt at a historical elucidation concerning it (modern art) would encounter the greatest difficulties, especially by reason of that contradictory and rare collective sentiment of ferocious individualism that characterizes its genesis.” (pg. 35)

The following sentence uses all three:

  • “Because it so happens that the critics of the very antiquated modern art–who come from more or less central Europe, in other words from nowhere–are letting their most succulently Rabelaisian ambiguities and their most truculently Cornelian error of situation in speculative cookery simmer in the Cartesian cassoulet.” (pg. 13)

Big Picture

His writing style is over the top in a way that is congruent with his public persona and the boldness and irrationality of many of his paintings. There also seems to be an underlying structure of thought that is pervasive in much of his work; paintings, writing, and public persona. He achieves his irrationality in very systematic ways: not randomly, but through the repetitive use of illogical and nonlinear thinking.

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