I didn't study art
and am not an expert in it, so when I first saw Salvador Dali's paintings, I
was astounded and wondered what it was all about. Surrealism was an art and
literary movement that began in the 1920s. Its leader Andre Breton had earlier
worked in a hospital and had even met Sigmund Freud; perhaps it was this
meeting that got him interested in the study of the unconscious, for he founded
the Surrealist movement, which he considered a revolutionary movement.
Surrealism seeks to free the unconscious to express itself. The first technique
was automatic writing which Breton expressed in 1924 as pure psychic automatism
- by which the actual processes of thought could be expressed. It is the
dictation of thought free from control from reason and any aesthetic or moral
considerations. If this seems odd, it gets odder still when we view the
surrealist paintings. Everyone accepts that something illogical has no value,
but the objective of this movement is exactly this – to create unnerving,
illogical scenes to free the unconscious.
Amazed by what I saw and read about
Surrealism, I drew the landscape shown below following the strange theories of
the Surrealist. It was an enthralling experience. In an attempt to draw
realistic or impressive drawings and avoid mistakes, the artist sometimes loses
the thrill of drawing and painting, his output drops. However, in this new surrealist method I used, mistakes are modified or left as they are to make the
drawing more energetic, the artist finds the true purpose of art - to express
oneself and be happy.
A few years ago, I read a book by a
famous scientist. In it, he says that while fields like physics were truly
profound, artists pretend to have done something great by profoundly describing their work, even going to the extent of using extravagant names, when in reality, it was all nonsense. If that was so, I wondered why some artists'
work sells for hundreds of millions of dollars while this scientist's books
fetch him a relatively small amount. The reason for this is that there are at
least some instances when an artist can capture our imagination far more than a
famous physicist can, and when this happens, it's not called nonsense; it's
called magic.
