My Surrealist World!
Has you probably already know, I am very interested in Surrealism. For me Surrealism isn’t a lie, it’s the truth that we cannot see. Surrealism let’s the imagination run wild, dream up the impossible and then claim it to be true. For many people Surrealism is mainly about two things:
- The unconscious mind/dreams.
- Liberty/freedom from the rules/borders/orders of everyday life.
This time, I am back with yet more Surrealism pictures/drawings. On this post I am sharing my pictures and talking about them. I can’t really tell you the meaning behind them all as there isn’t really one. I simply drew them to express what I was feeling and thinking at the time of portraying. Also, why should there be meaning on them?
Here is a drawing I did a while ago titled “Trails”, can you guess why? The sleeping lady dreams colourful dreams. The colours then race around the page. Two different hearts of different colours (pink and red) are sewn together and made one.
A smaller heart (purple with a yellow lining) bursts open and reveals a pearl within itself. In two corners a butterfly and a dog are connected by their thoughts of each other. On the right hand side the word “Future” is written backwards with a coloured check pattern drawn over the top of the it.
In this piece the notes which represents the bird’s song is then transformed into darting comets which fly around the page. It is as if the comets are dancing with each other as the song warbles away.
This picture was inspired by the fragments inside of an orange/clementine/satsuma/tangerine. On the top half we have the Life in three different aspects — Flowers, Humans, and Chicks. On the bottom half we have Death, again in three different aspects — Crows, Ghosts, and Dead Leaves.
Then on the left there is a Red Heart which is the Heart of Life. And on the right there is a Grey Heart which is, as you probably guessed, the Heart of Death. In centre is the thing that connects everything together. It is the The Seed or The Tree of Life.
On the other sides of the Hearts are two messages. The message on the left reads:
From the left to the right on the half
not bottom,
Lies the living of breath and
mind that does
possess them.
The message on the right reads:
From the right to the left stands the
dead that have no love nor
fear and they cannot hop and they cannot
leap.
In this piece there’s a clue in the title “Ego Amore.” which is Latin for “I Love.” Here we are the flames of passion represented by a huge roaring fire and stuck in the middle of the heat is a purple-pink heart.
The heart has boats in the place of two eyes and a big flower where a mouth would be. The ships have flags and are sailing free. Whereas the flower stays where it is in the ground showing off its beautiful loveliness (flowers or buds also symbolize fertility).
When I started to draw “Cut And Burn.” I didn’t exactly know what I wanted to portray but I did know that I wanted to have it based in a gallery.
In the three pictures shown here, the sun rises through them from bottom left to top right. A silver-grey rope threads itself through all the pictures and where it touches the painting the pictures rips open.
On the left-hand side of the rope a flame has started to catch and is now travelling down the line of it. The flame also drips blood as it goes, which spills onto the floor of the gallery.
This Surrealist drawing I did is basically just built on a pun. The pun is ‘Spring’ which can obviously mean the season or it can mean the action ‘to spring’ or it might refer to ‘a metal spring or wire’. And here there are metal springs coiled under the ground that are literally springing out the Spring, if you like. And Spring itself here is being shown as baby birds, snowdrops, daffodils, and roses.
If you want to learn more about Surrealists then check out these videos about Leonora Carrington and Salvador Dali & his muse/wife Gala Dali —
Carrington:
Leonora Carrington — Britain’s Lost Surrealist | TateShots — YouTube
Dali:
Celeste on Salvador Dali, surrealism and artistic inspiration | Reframed | Tate Collective — YouTube
Thanks for reading,
Hetty Monksea
