Surrealist painting

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” ― Salvador Dalí

The 20th Century avant-garde movement started by Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte has always interested me but I have never really brought it through into my practice. Surrealist imagery is probably the most recognizable element of the movement, yet it is also the most elusive to categorize and define. Each artist relied on their own recurring motifs through their dreams or unconscious mind. At its basic, the imagery is outlandish and perplexing, but it is meant to break the viewer out of their comfort zone. Artists such as Dalí, Tanguy, and Magritte painted in a hyper-realistic style in which objects were depicted in crisp detail and with the illusion of three-dimensionality, emphasizing their dream-like quality. The color in these works was often either saturated like Dali or monochromatic like Tanguy, both choices conveying a dream state. This idea of the dream state and the subconscious is what I want to bring into my own work. However, my work is portrait based and the Surrealist movement was heavily focused on the Landscape with exceptions like Rene Magritte, my favourite painting of his being The Son of Man.