THE MAGIC OF UNREALITY

 

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 real 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 that is illogical has no value, but the objective of this movement is exactly this – to create unnerving, illogical scenes with the objective of freeing the unconscious.

Amazed by what I saw and read about Surrealism I drew the landscape shown below following the strange theories of the Surrealist. I think too much rational thinking can sometimes be bad, because logic can take you only so far. When there is too much rational thinking and too little creativity I think it leads to unhappiness. With logic you can prove many things, with creativity you don't have to. So I decided to draw "automatically". 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........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...As anyone looking at the drawing can see, it was a horrible drawing, but it really was a liberating and enjoyable experience.

A few years ago I read a book by a famous scientist and in it he says that while fields like physics were truly profound, artists pretend to have done something great by describing their work in a profound way, even going to the extent of using extravagant names, while 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...