A Surreal Week

For our second week of summer classes we took a look at the bizarre and the dreamlike art of the surrealists. We focused on the element value and the principal balance. We also looked at Rene Margritte (My favorite surrealist) and a later surrealist Leonora Carrington. Leonora Carrignton has an interesting story that includes leaving home behind, having an affair with a married man and becoming an ex-pat in Mexico. Juicy enough to keep teens interested in her biography and work.

Our first project was to take a surrealist work and make it our own. I did a similar project to this last year which you can see here.

After our studies of the masters students began to create their own surrealist works. These were based on what they understood to be surrealism. They wrote their own definitions, and based their work on some of the automatic writing we had done.

As you can tell some students used photoshop and some painted. We had created small photoshop images based on automatic poems we had written earlier in the week, so they had both materials as an option.