Creating Surreal Art
By John W. Healy

Children can use art to deal with some of the scarier images they come across in their dreams.

Dreams can be a rich source of surrealistic art. Artists mine the world around them in search of material for their artistic expression. A landscape, a still life, models and photographs, among other things, have a general tendency to stimulate art that is based in the world we know during our waking hours.

Dreams, on the other hand, provide the artist with an opportunity to see an altered reality. This can lead to the realm of surrealist art, an art movement influenced by Sigmund Freud's research on dreams. Surrealism may, at times, use recollection of dreams to stimulate original art. Familiar subjects and objects are distorted and positioned in an unusual context in this genre.

While it would appear that surrealism is a remote concept, consider the CBS logo. The "eye," as we know it today, was first aired on television in 1951 floating against a black and white sky with white clouds – a unique surrealist image. Surrealism is popular with advertisers as well as our students because it's so attention getting.

Intro to surrealism
The two operative words to help understand surrealism are distortion and juxtaposition. Distortion is when familiar objects and subjects are altered, yet remain recognizable. An example would be the famous melting clocks and unique landscapes created by Salvador Dali in his painting, "The Persistence of Memory."

Juxtaposition is when familiar objects and shapes are compared in unusual and incongruous ways. An example of this principle would be Rene Magritte's painting, "L'homme au chapeau melon." A man in a derby hat, jacket and tie has a white dove flying directly in front of his face, obscuring his identity.

Both principles may be demonstrated in the same work of surrealist art.

The lesson
Ask your students to recall a dream they experienced. This question will evoke a great deal of interest. Many children will be quite excited to share such an unusual experience with their classmates.

A dream can be defined as "imagining while asleep" – a sequence of images that come involuntarily to the mind of a sleeping person. Many times it's a mix of real and imaginary places, characters and events. Human beings may dream as much as three to six times a night.

Dreamers experience a wide range of human experiences as symbolic of their actual life experiences. There are many categories of dreams which often blur into one another.

For example, dreams of falling may represent feelings of loss, while dreams of flying could represent success or optimism. Dreams of being pursued often indicate feelings of frustration. A dream is not an experience we have mastery of, or a choice in creating.

Dreams as art

1. Ask students to select a dream that's particularly memorable. If a student doesn't want to volunteer a dream experience, they can create one.
2. Determine if the students' dreams fall into one of the aforementioned categories.
3. Rough a pencil sketch of the dream focusing on a key aspect of the experience. Many people dream in black and white, so pencil and white drawing paper may be appropriate for the students to use.
4. The pencil sketch will be used to organize a layout for the illustration. Students will gather models and photographs as specific reference materials for their dream art.
5. Once the students' art is complete, exhibit along with written material defining dreams, their different categories and their possible meanings.

Things that go bump in the night
An illustration by Jonathan Tilles, age 9, is an good example of the type of original and expressive outcome engendered by this lesson. Jonathan's drawing (above), called "Nightmare," shows what he sees as he turns a corner at the end of a long hall. The unexpected apparition startled him quite a bit. He felt better talking about his dream experience and using it to create interesting art.

This lesson is designed to help make dream experiences less mysterious and frightening. While dream interpretation is subject to conjecture, it will lead students on a path of exciting self-discovery and original art.

Dr. John W. Healy teaches art at Woodland Middle School, East Meadow, NY.

March 2005, Vol.35, No.6