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
