I paint ideas and feelings. From the beginning, my paintings were compared to surrealism, and this term is familiar to the general public as a certain type of painting, a fantastical, dream-like and eccentric image. For the reason of succinct description I don’t object to my work being described as surrealist, but I don’t adhere to or care about the principles of that 1930s group. For me, I’m trying to represent the maximum gamut of feeling and concept.
Another related term is Magical Realism. The principle difference between the two is that surrealism is supposed to depict the unfiltered unconscious of the artist, although to many adherents of surrealism, including its founders, surrealism is not an art form but a tool of mental change which can be used to drive social change. Surrealism was almost a form of therapy, but initially a form of experimentation upon the mind without an external outcome, it was an internal examination.
Magical realism, on the other hand, is an art genre which includes imaginative elements. Surrealism is supposed to contain only unconsidered, unfiltered, unconscious output. To some extent, surrealism is designed to be unfathomable and enigmatic. Magical realism creates a realistic and possible world with elements which may be fantastical or beyond normal experience. Magical realism can be, perhaps should be, created consciously and understood by the viewer or reader, taken as normal. Its imaginative tools are used to create an emotional and intellectual effect; reality is pushed into the fantastic to enhance a narrative, to make a point. In this respect, perhaps all literature could be seen as a form magical realism with more or less magic, more or less fantasy, as all literature is an abstraction of actual reality. Actual reality, in all its wonder, can’t ever be portrayed in full by an artwork; the artist must abstract, parody, enhance and bend reality in ways subtle and otherwise to make a point, and light an emotion.
What makes magical realism magic is that it contains fantastical elements, so its reality tends to be bent substantially. H. G. Wells ‘The Invisible Man’ is not generally considered to be magical realism, although one could argue for its case, it’s more fantastical than a Charles Dickens work. A similar case can be made for fairytales or works of fantasy. For me, these labels may be useful for some form of genre categorisation, but there is another simpler metric, one from mundane reality, stretching to a strange reality of fantastical imagination, and that is all.
The unconscious is a problematical concept altogether which I explore in more depth in my book ‘21st Century Surrealism’. Setting that analysis aside we will consider the unconscious in the most commonly accepted way as a pile of ‘hidden thoughts’ which can impose themselves on our conscious minds. There is undoubtedly a constant dialogue between what is conscious and what is unconscious, and any creative act involves both of these factions of mind. We cannot say for certain that an idea is wholly conscious or wholly unconscious, a thought is a thought, and when a thought used to generate idea in a creative context, the origin of the idea becomes moot. It’s quite possible for a genuine and trained surrealist to output a stream of consciousness pile of words, and for a second magical realist artist to create the same words. The effect of a fantastical scene upon a viewer or reader would be the same whether the source was conscious or unconscious, or a mix of the two. This, more than any reasoning, explodes the boundary between art genres.
It is the job of an artist to communicate an idea, to communicate a meaning and feeling, and any and all tools are valid. A random act, like an ink-blot, an act by a machine, can do this; so the source of the information, the method of creation, is not important.
Reality, non-fiction, biography and autobiography, realistic fiction, crime fiction, fairytale, science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and surrealism. These labels may help a bookshop or critic, but it’s perhaps more rational to rate a work on a scale of tedious and ‘real’ to extraordinary, creative, different from the norm. It is the latter to which all artists aspire, but we can only go so far, or the result is randomness, nonsense. Science fiction uses tropes to build a structures which ground the educated reader in the mechanics of the world, and for more complex and creative works, these are needed as mental scaffolding to inform the reader, or viewer of art. The job of artist is communication, not mere expression. It is for this reason that fantasy is always, to some degree, grounded in reality. In nonsense, only those patterns of reality we see, become art; only a bad artist would consider those random encounters art. The task of the artist is to touch a known reality in new ways.
