Stay inspired,
-al
Hi there everyone, hope you had a great weekend! This morning I was unfortunately suffering from a bit of writer’s block and could not for the life of me decide on what to write about for today’s blog. Luckily, my instinctual turn to learning from art history inspired me to write about a few (legal) ways artists have used in the past to get creating! After all, did you ever wonder how those unusual and evocative paintings of Surrealists like Dali, Ernst or Miró came to be? Well, there were quite a few fun techniques utilized by the Surrealists which I will detail here. Firstly, to give a very brief summary, Surrealism began as a literary movement after the First World War. André Breton, who studied medicine and psychiatry, was inspired to write the Surrealist Manifesto after treating traumatized war veterans in Nantes. He began to see that our conscious self was not a good representation of our entire being, but rather just the tip of the iceberg. Much like Freud’s concentration on unconscious thought, Breton believed that the expression of our underlying desires could be achieved through a focus on dreaming, similar to the soldiers who had flashbacks of war, and ”pure psychic automatism”. Of course using dream as an inspiration to make art is fairly self-explanatory, but you are probably thinking; what on Earth is “pure psychic automatism”? This phrase was how Breton defined Surrealism. Basically it is achieved through a series of automatic techniques, based in Surrealist values, which aim to bring out the “id”, or the unconscious, baser part of our personality, through removing any conscious influence on composition. This includes processes such as the stream of consciousness, also known as automatic writing, and automatic art making. Automatic art making is attempted through various games and methods that you may actually already be familiar with. Firstly there are a few variations on the theme of automatic drawing such as randomly scribbling, shading over an uneven surface, connecting lines between imperfections on your canvas or even drawing in the dark. Splattering ink and paint or letting the smoke from a lit candle produce random lines on a sheet of paper are also methods of automatic art making. Whether you leave your work as just the pattern created or use the lines as a basis for a more complicated image is up to you! Either way, you are sure to be inspired. Other fun techniques influence the work at a later stage of production by scraping away paint, adding collage and texture to wet paint or even cutting up the entire image and rearranging it in no particular order. My personal favourite however, and one that is incredibly entertaining to do with a group of friends, is called Exquisite Corpse. Though the name is a little strange, you might have played this game before without even realizing its historical significance in the art world. Basically, starting with a blank page, you either write, draw or collage something on part of a piece of paper. You then fold this creation so that when the paper is passed around, no one can see what the people before them have drawn or written. At the end of the process, you will be left with a bizarre and often humorously skewed piece of artwork or poetry. The unexpected image or word juxtapositions can be either wholly nonsensical or strangely striking and are often very memorable. After one such session of automatic writing for example, Breton was stuck with a particular phrase in his head, the elusive ”Cinderella ashtray”. After obsessing over the phrase for weeks on end, he found a spoon in a curiosity shop which he believed fulfilled this unconscious connection. This shows truly how inspirational such a simple game can be! Hope some of these techniques will help you get out of a rut as they did for me and berry eight dash cocoon wind duodenum monkey petal. (My attempt at automatic writing).
Stay inspired, -al
3 Comments
Mari
6/10/2013 11:13:06 am
I think I know what I'll be doing at my next dinner party! Expect some very surreal Exqusite Corpse submissions soon -Mari
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Lillienne
6/10/2013 03:37:45 pm
I love Surrealist games! Automatic writing and automatic art-making are some faves. I think I need to host an Exquisite Corpse night myself...
Reply
Michele
6/10/2013 03:42:39 pm
Ashley I think we should do this for our next team meeting!
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