Drawing Surrealism and Life

It has been a while since I have blogged consistently. Sometimes life takes over and you have to go into hibernation for a while to recover. Crazy stuff happens you know. You just have to roll with the punches and keep going, keep living, keep working. Inevitably when you are being hit by an onslaught of seemingly never ending crap, blogging becomes less of a priority as you try to wade through it all, reaching for the light at the end of the shitty tunnel.

I am out of the tunnel, still creating, always creating.

Last year, I signed up to the draw365 day challenge on Twitter. During the year, I have done more than 365 drawings! I have lost count. I have a pile of sketchbooks. Last years drama meant that I was away from my social media platforms for a while so did not post the pics. Today, I posted about 13 drawings- mostly recent creations via twitter. Some from my imagination and one or two are quick sketches of surrealist works from Francis Picabia and Giorgio De Chrico taken from the Visual Encyclopedia of Art on Surrealism published by Scala.

Homage to Giorgio De Chrico. “The Uncertainty of the Poet.” 1913. In my head, the bananas are really plantain and the arse in my drawing is a little bigger 😉

Consciously or unconsciously, I have been influenced by the surrealist movement ever since I was a child. If I can find the crazy sketches I made from my dreams when I was a child I would make adult versions of my childhood dreams. That would be interesting I think.

In 1924, many artists considered that “the time had come to liberate expressive form, to release the world of the subconscious of dreams and of pure psychic automatism.”

“They were willing to give shape to their nightmares, paranoia, suppressed eroticism, and the dark side of the mind.”

“The surrealism defined by Andre Breton was outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations”

(All of the above quotations were taken from the Visual Encyclopedia of Art on Surrealism published by Scala)

I just adore that description. It feels so much like where my thinking comes from in terms of the birth place of my work. Where I started from when I would sit in my bedroom as a hormonal teenager, daydreaming and drawing crazy otherworldly things that always felt just beyond the grasp of my own reality. This is what I am going back to now. Hopefully, in studying, reflecting and allowing my dreams to impinge upon my reality through my work once more, I will be able to go back to the place where I began and really go deep inside of myself and bring out something true and real but at the same time unreal that causes you to wander. Wander about yourself, about life, about things that we humans may have difficulty in comprehending in our conscious minds while at the same time confronting the reality of what is.