The Visit

 I've been in the mood for some surrealism lately. So I'm holding back a little on making desert landscape paintings and I'm doing some small surrealism works!

The latest piece -- The Visit -- combines surrealism and a bit of desert landscape! 8" x 10" / 20cm x 25cm.

Even though I paint surrealism, I never try to explain what the images mean, usually because I don't know what they mean. In this case, I wanted a scene of a human walking through an otherworldly desert, similar to something one might see in a dream.

In fact, dream imagery is critical to my way of working -- dreams that might be a little disturbing, but the scenes are not nightmarish. This is the Salvador Dali-ish world I love to create. Some modern-day surrealism is too pretty, or too much a mere assemblage of seemingly unrelated objects thrown together in a view, or scary/ugly monstrous animals or mutated humans. Not my thing at all!

So is this female on a vision quest? Is she lost? Dream-walking? Heading into an unknown future, good or bad (as we all must)? Don't know!

All I know is: there's something freeing to me about doing these kinds of paintings. Let's face it -- I'm a surreal kind of guy. AND PROUD OF IT!!

Mark Junge

www.MarkJunge.com or www.SouthwestSpaces.com

Painting Dreams

My earliest days as an artist were when I was deeply into surrealism, especially imagery that seemed to appear like dreams I've had.

I still love those images. Many of Salvador Dali's works were like that, and his realistic technique made the "dreams" totally believable -- a look that I embraced.

Suburbs of a Paranoic-Critical Town

Detail

(Sorry the detail of the painting isn't sharper).

For the dreamy effect, this is one of my favorite Dali paintings -- in particular, the gal holding the bunch of grapes, looking directly at the viewer, is exactly the type of thing I see in MY dreams.

Yet, another artist made paintings that appear to be even more dreamlike -- those of Belgium artist Paul Delvaux. The people (often women) sit or walk as if they are in a dreamlike trance.

Many of Delvaux's figures are nude, and I don't want to freak out my more conservative readers. So here is an example of a Delvaux painting without too much nudity (or lesbian activity, which he seemed to be into):

The Retreat - Paul Delvaux

Delvaux usually painted females, a few males, architecture, trains and human skeletons -- often in some combination within a piece.

His realism technique isn't, in my opinion, as nice as Dali's, but Delvaux's images appeal to me more. The latter's art reminds me so much of what I see when I sleep (except my dreams have more variety). I get a kick out of my dreams, but I've rarely painted actual dreams of mine because I often feel like they wouldn't lend themselves to a single image. (If I made videos and had the means to pull them off, THAT might be different!)

I'll continue to paint traditional, classical realism-inspired landscapes. But painting surreal scenes gets my soul into my work in a way that realism doesn't. We'll see what I come up with!

Mark Junge
www.MarkJunge.com