ARTWORDSSurrealism: Dark Brain Revisited

Taking a lobster for a walk, having fried eggs for eyes...I think it's easy to be superficially surrealist. It's very hard to be originally so, but a different matter altogether to genuinely draw deeply from one's unconscious dreaming mind, and doubly difficult to then shape that raw material into profound finished work. I speak as someone who has merely nibbled at the edges of Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. Here's his official definition:

Surrealism, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

I find it very difficult to acheive this level of relinquishing control of my reasoning mind. When I sometimes think I'm approaching automatism, it turns out to be more stream-of-consciousness than stream-of-unconsciousness. Perhaps this is why I quest so much after ways of introducing serendipity or chance elements into my art and music - serious playing! Still, I think surrealism seeps into my drawing, although it could be a memory of looking at so many other surrealist works! D'oh!!

I have a preference for the surrealist artists who tend towards amorphous, ambigous form and movement - especially Joan Miro, Max Ernst & maybe Andre Masson. I also love the teasing conceptual playfulness of Rene Magritte, my favourite of those who use more exact representation. Not to say I can't enjoy a furry teacup or a lobster telephone from time-to-time either! The former approach has obviously influenced my Dark Brain drawings seen here. Perhaps the nearest I've ever got, although you may think that little is really revealed. 'Dark' is meant as the unchartered areas deep down where the light of reason doesn't usually shine, which is not exclusively the primitive, amoral, unspeakable & unthinkable - but certainly includes those.

(I apologise for dragging in almost two year's old work - I wanted to create a new one, but found I couldn't do it to order. The writing is hot off the press anyway.)