Surreal
Today’s Sunday had an interesting origin. I was fishing for ideas… so I checked today’s date in Wikipedia… and found that it is the birthday of Guillaume Apollinaire. He is the writer-art critic who coined the word “Surrealism.”
So with this, I began researching Surrealism, as I didn’t know a whole lot about it (I just knew that I didn’t care much for the movement in general). I found plenty of material on the net… including free streaming audio of Oxford art history classes on the matter (gosh they use big words at Oxford). Anyhow, the toon didn’t take shape until I’d spent the workday listening to all kinds of audio on the movement (I can listen and color toons at the same time… I just love podcasts!).
What I have found is that I still am not fond of the Surrealists…but I did find something I connected with… which was that the Surrealists experimented with chance. I found this interesting as it isn’t often well-known… they would take walks in the park and be attuned to the chance meetings and encounters. They also were into automatic writing and drawing… where you empty your mind and then draw or write the inner dialogue you had with out editing. That I can get on with.
across the street from where i work is a supermarket. upon the roof of said market perches somewhere in the neighborhood of between two hundred and fifteeen thousand seagulls.
every so often said gulls would take off, en masse, to, uh, do their business.
this can last for several minutes and the sound is reminiscent of a cloudburst. (okay, so i exaggerate).
it is at those times one should either carry an umbrella or hope for some quick cover under an eave…
Randie would do well to get a hat that doesn’t have a bull’s eye on top.
I dig surrealists for their ability to render their own original creativity on otherwise normal everyday objects and/or people.
Those Oxford folks likely use their big words to justify their big dictionaries.
Randie’s painting looks like a passing dream, only in color!
That chiuahua yipper dog on the trike is hilarious. Is that a beard he’s wearing or did he drink a can of coke beforehand that’s now foaming up and out?
firedome… That description is horrific. I’ve found large coastal parking lots to be like concrete oceans with seagulls perching atop car roofs as if they’re rocks jutting out of the ocean. Sometimes several seagulls to a car…can we say SUV? And, yeah, they do sometimes leave momentos.
Yat… It won’t look like a bullseye for long.
Stick,
I think the fact that she saw the yapper dog on FOAM street has something to do with it…
The use of chance by the surrealists was in some measure faked. There are several records of people asking Marcel Duchamp for details after failing to achieve usable results following his stated chance procedures. MD’s response was that he had never tried the exercise himself since it was the idea of the chance proess that was important.
Never cared for the Surrealists, or the Pointilists, either. Impressionists can be either very good, like Van Gogh, or very, very bad! Always more of a Rembrandt or something llike that person. Especially Rubens, since I’m somewhat built that way.
Ha, thought she felt a raindrop until reality struck… and she’s now wear’in a head scarf.
jude… Good call, I can see that.
Ruth… I’m sort’a tossed-up by abstractionists myself. Some abstracts can be so vibrant, alive and expressive while others can be such pieces of trash.
Firedome, I work across the way from you next to said market, and I can concur about the seagulls. Only I ocasionally do have to run under them to get into my place of work.