This Week Revolutionary Art

"From its very beginning, surrealism resisted all attempts to turn it into a doctrine. Instead of teaching a system, the surrealists set out, by means of appropriate actions and productions, to create new demands on reality. They set out to liberate the workings of the subconscious, disrupting conscious thought processes by the use of irrationality and enigma, and exploiting the artistic possibilities of terror and eroticism. In this way they created a new form of sensibility which had a profound influence on modern art, and which was able to meet an enormous range of personal requirements and to find expression in the greatest possible variety of creative processes. Surrealist artists and writers became international masters whose influence was so fertile that any study of them seems to lead right to the heart of the most important avant-garde work of our era.

Unlike romanticism, with which it has often been compared, surrealism was able to establish, between the language of the plastic arts and the language of poetry, a relationship which was not limited to the illustration of the one by the other. It set poetry at the centre of everything, and used art to make poetry into something which could be seen and touched. The surrealist painters and sculptors, moreover, were themselves poets."all-art.org
Beginning With Surrealism...

Amanda Sage

Amanda Sage (b. 1978, United States) is primarily a painter based in Vienna. She trained and worked with the Fuchs dynasty of artists, being one of the more notable students..



Jake Baddeley





"The 'double image' technique which some of the surrealists used to great effect was anticipated by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, official portrait painter to the Holy Roman Emperors, who lived at the Hapsburg court from 1560 to 1587. He was noted for his 'composite heads', in which he used assembled objects to make up allegories and portraits."

Jooa Mumper


"Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Fussli), a Swiss-born painter who lived in England, liked to paint dreams in which a sleeping creature was surrounded by unreal figures; his most successful picture in this genre was The Nightmare (1782, Frankfurt, Goethe-Museum). His taste for tragic lighting effects and his fondness for fairy landscapes, where wyverns mingle with winged toads, redeem his over-literary inspiration : most of its subjects were drawn from Shakespeare. The poet-engraver William Blake was more openly a visionary. He had genuine hallucinations during which he saw into the future and conversed with angels and with the dead. In his visionary epics, illustrated with engravings, and in his illustrations to Dante, he expresses Chaos and the Forces of Good and Evil with frenetic brilliance."
melanesian art