Painting Research

There are basically two separate environments in our project: The Gallery Interior and inside the painting. As I mentioned previously, we all thought that a surreal painting environment, and one that almost lacks a physical structure, would be a really nice contrast to the interior of the museum. With that said, I dug out many of my old A-level art folders and began looking for an artist that would match the theme we were going for. During year 13 I had done a lot of work in the style of MC Escher and the strange environments he sketched out in black and white. I really liked the work that he'd done, particularly the work he did based around impossible structures and his experiments with perspective, and his ability to recreate these things straight from his head completely amazes me. However, I felt that while his work was a pretty good fit for the project, it still involves a lot of geometric shapes like buildings and interiors which I wanted to try to move away from.

On searching his name into google a lot of searches came back mentioning the art movement 'Surrealism'. This seemed like a perfect place to start looking for even more artists to work from. After researching the movement further I found that it was entirely dedicated to expressing dream like content that is without conventional structure. Perfect!

One of the first artists I came across was Max Ernst. Ernst was a german painter who never had any professional artistic training, but was studying philosophy at university when he dropped out to pursue his painting further. His interest in philosophy may be what led him to Surrealism as it focuses around themes of reality and reason. His part in the first world war dramatically interrupted his artwork, and he admitted in his autobiography that “Max Ernst died 1^st of August, 1914. He was resurrected on the 11^th November 1918 as a young man who aspired to find the myths of his time”.

His time spent at war can be seen in quite a lot of his work, particularly this painting “The Elephant Celebes” with the elephant being a huge mechanic sculpture which relates back to his time spent around so many deadly machines when he fought for Germany.

I really like this painting! And I was never really an artistic person, I was more interested in sketching realistic things and trying to be accurate than representing things within fine art paintings. But I think the elephant in this is really cool and the setting for it seems really surreal and very different to that of the museum. However, I think the mechanic nature of the painting means that I'm not going to be carrying it through to the project, and the search will continue! I'm going to continue to look through the Surrealism movement to see if I can find more artists.