Surrealism combines realistic images together in a new way.
According to Surrealism.org, in the 1920s the surrealist movement in art captured the images from the subconscious. While Salvador Dali’s melting clocks in his painting "The Persistence of Memory" may be one of the most famous surrealist pieces, other surrealist artists also made their mark on the movement. Many artists today still create works in the surrealist vein. If you count yourself among them, many sources of inspiration exist to inspire your surrealist paintings.
Dream Imagery
The history of surrealism is all about recording the goings on of the unconscious, according to the Surrealism website. Dreams have their own logic and their own imagery. These images offer you many opportunities to create some very personal artwork, since all the images come from you. To capture the images from your dreams, keep a notebook by your bed. When you wake up, record your dreams. Naturally, you can write them down in journal format, but you may want to make some sketches as well since it’s the images you want to capture. Once you have a few sketches, you can begin creating paintings based upon them.
Inspired Collages
If you’re at a loss for images to incorporate into a surrealist painting, try starting a collage. Gather magazines of different sorts-the more different the better-and start cutting out images in each that appeal to you. Because the magazines are so different from one another, you shouldn't be able to put the pictures together in a logical way. For example, you might find a picture of an escalator and combine it with photos of a root cellar or clouds. Once you have these images picked out, you can begin your painting based upon them.
Variation on a Theme
Surrealist Rene Magritte was famous for putting common images together in a different way than they were ever seen before. For example, his mermaid consisted of human legs and a fish head. Ask yourself what kind of images could you put together in a different way. Make some sketches of your ideas to get them down on paper. Create paintings of the ideas that go in a promising direction.
Fool the Eye
Surrealist art maintains a certain amount of realism in it, which is subsequently twisted into something not real. Rene Magritte’s painting "The Blank Cheque" is an example of this, as is MC Escher’s "Bond." These images play a lot with positive and negative space. They also deconstruct readily recognizable images and turn them into something unreal. If you’d like to take this route for your surrealist art, study the work of surrealists who use this technique to get an idea of what types of images they use. Then create images of your own based on these or similar concepts.
