
Originally Posted by
Slab_Bulkhead
The Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts is having a David Lynch exhibit in September, and with it, a chance to see some Lynch movies on the big screen. What do you make of Surrealism? I read more about the creative processes involved with the movement, and I was struck by how I could find echoes of it in artists I like who work in other mediums. David Lynch has described using meditation to come up with ideas, and Bob Dylan has been known to just pick combinations of words that he finds appealing.
I fail to see what's less artistic or creative about using those sorts of "automatic" techniques vs. say, using a model or a pre-existing scene as a basis for a work. Some Pop Artists have used a projector to form outlines, and then painted that. And there's Hyperrealism today, which uses digital photographs as a reference for painting. Why is that more creative than creating something out of patterns in doodles and woodgrain, or the images of dreams and meditation?
Sometimes I think surrealism is a perfect balance, between the mundaneness of more realistic or representational stuff, and the obtuseness of more abstract stuff (like Abstract Expressionism).
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