THE MAGIC OF SURREALISM - Short Story 8 (Short Stories for Artist, Poets and those who Wander)

 

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 encounter 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 - Nothing less. 

Amazed by what I saw and read about Surrealism, I decided to invent a new branch of Surrealism that I call the "Mistake Method". I drew landscapes following this strange theory. 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, and his output drops. However, in this new surrealist method I used, mistakes are left as they are to make the drawing more energetic. If a line goes wrong, as it usually does when drawing freely without much effort, it is not erased, but another more "correct" line is drawn. The first line adds energy to the drawing, while the second line makes it realistic. It was incredibly liberating. I found the true purpose of art - to express myself 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 describing their work in a profound way, 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.