Surrealism / Reality and imagination in art and poetry

Phillipe Halsman's photograph "Dalí Atomicus" (1948) of famous surrealist Salvador Dalí jumping into the air with three cats flying past him captures the essence of surrealism, bending reality while letting the imagination soar

Surrealism: reality and imagination in art and poetry

Uncovering the interplay of realism and fantasy in surrealists' universes

25 NOVEMBER 2024, 

MERYEM CHAGRAOUI

Metaphors arise from the womb of reality. They are fundamentally tied to the tangible world, and their beauty and effectiveness depend on this connection. If a metaphor cannot be traced back to real-life experiences or observations, it fails to fulfil its primary purpose. This link to reality is what makes metaphors resonate with us. They provide a way to understand complex ideas through familiar experiences, bridging the gap between the known and the unknown.

 

Karl Blossfeldt. Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Karl Blossfeldt

6 Sep — 5 Oct 2019 at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Spain

13 SEPTEMBER 2019

The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and LOEWE Perfumes present a selection of 40 photographs from the album Urformen der Kunst [Original forms of art], by the German photographer and sculptor Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932), who photographed plants and flowers throughout his life. Published in 1928, it was the work that brought Blossfeldt to public attention and gave him entry to the art scene of the day, making him one of the most important of the New Objectivity photographers.

The high quality of the paper and printing of these fascinating photographs further enhances the beauty of their powerful images, in which lighting and composition are used to emphasise the sculptural and graphic qualities of the plants. From the outset Blossfeldt’s photographs were compared to African sculptures and provided a source of inspiration for the Bauhaus industrial designers and creators.

1. Karl Blossfeldt. Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
2. Karl Blossfeldt. Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
3. Karl Blossfeldt. Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

MEER

Joseph M. W. Turner, The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 1834. Courtesy of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Proust and the arts

4 Mar — 8 Jun 2025 at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Spain

11 JANUARY 

The museum is presenting an exhibition on the importance of art in the work of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Marcel Proust (Auteuil, 1871 - Paris, 1922), recognised both in literature and in philosophy and art theory. The aesthetic ideas that Proust developed in his work, the artistic, architectural and landscape settings that surrounded him and which he recreated in his books, as well as the contemporary and earlier artists who served to stimulate him are among the aspects that articulate the structure of this exhibition, which aims to highlight this connection and the interrelation between art and his life and work. 

 

Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Santana playing at Einmalige Union in Hamburg, Germany

"Wagon Wheel" and its history of creative change

Dylan’s forgotten demo to Darius Rucker’s chart-topping cover

16 JULY 2025, 

OLIVER D. ROBERTS

Did John Steinbeck steal from the Book of Genesiswhen he wrote East of Eden? Was it plagiarism when the Coen brothers made O Brother, Where Art Thou?, having shaped the story around Homer’s Odyssey? And was it stealing when Darius Rucker covered “Wagon Wheel”? Or, for that matter, was it plagiarism when Bob Dylan recorded a demo using lyrics and tropes from decades-old blues songs?

 

Chesed by Marlene Burns

Interview with Marlene Burns: art as sacred expression

Faith and creativity through Judaic art and sanctuary design

15 FEBRUARY 2025, 

BRENDA LEE BOHEN

Marlene Burns has been a professional artist for over 55 years, beginning with an apprenticeship in sanctuary art while earning two university degrees in fine art. Her career has included gallery affiliations and cultivating a clientele for contemporary art in residential and commercial spaces.

The oldest form of art / Body art has always been used to express identity

 

Tribe dawning traditional body art

The oldest form of art

Body art has always been used to express identity

4 OCTOBER 2023, 

LINDA ETUK

Whether it’s a cultural rite of passage, a reward of bravery, evidence of merit, a sentimental piece, or just a really cool design, people have been getting their bodies modified for many reasons since prehistory. 

Morgane Ely / Hostess and guests

 

Morgane Ely, Dinner à la japonaise (detail), 2025. Courtesy of Prima Gallery

Hostess and guests

10 Oct — 15 Nov 2025 at the Prima Gallery in Paris, France

17 SEPTEMBER 2025

With Morgane Ely, woodcut is not a means to reproduce images, it is a way to embody them. The carved plates, shaped over long hours of meticulous work, are not tools but artworks in their own right. No prints here. What’s shown are the matrices themselves: inked, scored, sometimes sprayed in acid-bright colors. Each piece seems to earn its own presence, raw, dense, and precise — a critique made material.

An Interview with Wendy Artin

 

Wendy in the Whisper Knit Cardigan

An Interview with Wendy Artin

Attersee’s first print collaboration features watercolors by the Rome-based artist Wendy Artin, whose figurative work explores the interaction of light and pigment on surface. Over the last two years, Attersee worked closely with Artin to create a textile print based on a series of the artist’s female nudes. Painted in lush sepia watercolor, Artin's figures stretch and dance across a selection of new and signature styles in silk twill and silk-cashmere voile.

Wendy Artin / Works

 

WENDY ARTIN

Wendy Artin is an American watercolor artist that lives in Rome.  I found out about her a few years ago, and have been a private fan ever since.  Now I get to share her with everyone!  :)  You can find her website at http://www.wendyartin.com/ .  Please visit it if you like this article- she's awesome, and there's a library of additional links, images, and articles on her.

The artist’s mind drifts beyond reality, where vulnerability becomes vision

Between creation and collapse: the artist's inner autopsyp

Why true art demands raw honesty, embraces pain and transforms wounds into beauty 

25 SEPTEMBER 2025, 

MERYEM CHAGRAOUI

You don’t know. You don’t know what it takes—what it truly costs—to be an artist.

It’s not about skill. It’s not about fame or aesthetics or education. It is something much deeper, more intimate, and infinitely more painful. To create real art, you must sit down with your entire being exposed. 

The magnificent world of Shiko Munakata

 

Shiko Munakata, Mt. Hakkoda, 1924, Aomori Museum of Art 

The magnificent world of Shiko Munakata

The Van Gogh of Aomori, Japan

16 NOVEMBER 2023, 

ALMA REYES

 

"The woodcut, unconcerned with good and evil, with ideas, with differences, tells us that it consists of truth alone.”
(Shiko Munakata)

Wendy Artin / Being in Time

 

WENDY ARTIN

BEING IN TIME

by Jessica Fisher

Wendy Artin, Brushes, 17 x 26 centimeters each, watercolor, 2014

✽ ✽ ✽

From the catalogue The Roman Studio

For the past several years, Wendy Artin and I have intermittently returned to a conversation we began while I was living in Rome. When I was first there, I felt paralyzed as a writer by what felt to me an injunction to repeat the great themes that have for so many centuries characterized an artist’s view of that monumental city. Artin’s work fascinated me because for her, the city’s familiar ruins and statues were anything but calcified; her paintings elucidate the way that time has shaped the objects she depicts, of course, but also, in her watery medium, stone re-enters the play of time. We began talking about nostalgia, that desire to return to the beloved, and about what each iteration of such a reencounter might bring anew. It was through our ongoing conversation that I began to think about the value of art as a trace, as the imprint of a hand or mind moving with or through its medium, constrained, as we all always are, by time. Whether painting classical subjects, her models, or fruits brought in from the market, Artin is absolutely committed to the present moment, which is both an ethics and, I think, an erotics. The immediacy of her art does not preclude loss - instead, since her painting is always of that which has been, one might say that it is imbued with it - but it does offer the fact of our being-in-time as an absolute, though fleeting, consolation. Indeed, one of the great tensions in Artin’s work is the play of time: watercolor is the most temporally-bound form of painting, yet of course the work of art also endures past the moment of its composition, to be experienced time and again.

Wendy Artin / An American watercolor artist

WENDY ARTIN

Wendy Artin is an American watercolor artist that lives in Rome.  I found out about her a few years ago, and have been a private fan ever since.  Now I get to share her with everyone!  :)  You can find her website at http://www.wendyartin.com/ .  Please visit it if you like this article- she's awesome, and there's a library of additional links, images, and articles on her.

The best of her work is full of a variety of precise hard edges and soft wet passages, where the dramatically simplified subject only partially emerges from the paper.  Her figurative paintings, to me, wonderfully distill that desire to let a painting be a record not only of the world held still for a moment, but also of the painter's body in motion, working in tandem with the paper and water.  You can see the delicate brushwork like a signature, the soft edges that remain behind after the water has evaporated, the texture of the paper popping through like peppered light.  The goal isn't to hide these gears and inner workings of the art-making process, to create a better illusion of sorts, but instead to share and use them to greater effect. 

Below is a video about her that I found.  We're lucky, because it shows some of her process.  Let's take a peak!

 

Process and Tools-

Having watched the video, a few things came forward to me.  You can see, both from the finished paintings she has on the walls of her home or from in-process shots of her painting, that she's not taping the paper down.  Early in the video we see her paint flat, with the work on a table or a backing in her lap, like this- 

I asked Wendy about her process, as well as a painter who took her workshop (thank you Allison!), and it seems pretty straight forward technically, atleast for the figures.  For quick studies, she works wet on dry- you can tell by all the hard edges.  Besides, this would be the only way to control things if you were completing a piece in 5 minutes or less.  For longer pieces, she wets the paper down with water, preserving highlights if need be.  She paints flat, and generally doesn't use clips.  Wendy paints directly without drawing (again, atleast for the figurative work- although I see no pencil work in her landscapes and architectural paintings either), putting in middle values that she then lifts color out of.  While it's still wet, she drops her darks in for richer shadows.  As things begin to dry, she gets her hard edges, if she hasn't preserved the hard edge from the beginning.  Once the water cycle is finished, she then rewets as need be for new soft edges, or she goes in for additional detail here and there, where the paper is dry.  You can see this around the 2:00 mark in the video, where she's doing the feet of the nude she's working on- all the edges are dry by then, and she's able to get more control. 

In terms of materials, she obviously paints tonally, and uses a mix of Sepia and Brown Madder, which she seems to shift the balance of, depending on her subject.  For her quicker studies, she uses Fabriano Ingres and BFK Rives papers (probably cheaper and easier to get a lot of), and for longer studies uses Arches.  From looking at the video, most of the figures fill a quarter sheet, with the multi-figure pages being approximately the same as a half sheet.  So the figure work isn't too small.  Allison (her student at the workshop with whom I spoke) noted that Wendy sometimes used a block as well, so she didn't seem very dogmatic about things.  It seemed more about availability, and ease of use.

 

Cityscapes-

Both from my email exchanges, and from the paintings themselves, it's clear that there is a desire for clear observation, that clear observation will guide a painting a long way down the path to success, and that approach bears itself out when you notice how certain elements of her paintings demonstrate a great deal of precision.  The paintings she does of statues and buildings show this to maximum effect.  A lot of modern urban watercolor work aims for a vigorous, sketchy style, where the goal is to simplify and take command of hard, deep shadows.  However, Wendy's work, in my opinion, takes a different approach.  despite the wet into wet work you see in the trees and shadows, her architectural work generally demonstrates a delicate attention to detail, cornices and roofing, overhangs and windows, etc. much of which she renders in controlled half-tones.  The marriage of those modulated values with these two approaches- a soft, painterly approach to wet-into-wet shadows and a delicate attention to precise detail- makes the paintings feel very true to life without feeling like a rendering.

The cityscapes remind me most of some of Sargent's work, which I mean as a high compliment.  Sargent's brushwork is much more staccato in style, while Wendy's uses soft edges to greater effect, but both seem to have an affinity for bonding very precise architectural detailing with loose painterly passages, all while generally working in modulated tones.

One of sargent's

one of wendy's

one of sargent's

one of wendy's

one of sargent's

one of wendy's

Yum!

 

A Singular Vision Across Varied Subjects-

What's also so very eye-opening (and liberating!) to see is the similarities between her approach to subject matter as diverse as figurative work, statues, landscapes, and vegetables.  Its very illuminating to see an artichoke or motorcycle painted much the same as a human figure!  As you look, note the soft edges shifting into locations of precision and clarity, as well as the value of the paper as part of the subject.

Of course, each subject has it's own story.  We're not just putting paint on paper.  We're representing something.  We paint cabbages and and motorcycles and figures because they interest us in some human way- we eat them or touch them or see them as part of our lives.  As we learn from the video, Wendy likes to eat artichokes.  Me too!  Hahahaha!  :)  Why wouldn't I want to paint something so delicious and physically interesting?  But additionally, as I see it, as an artist the goal is to explore diffusion and clarity, hard and soft edges, lost light and discovered light.  Namely, to transcribe with a physical medium (paint) the act of seeing light.  As I look across the paintings, a similar vision emerges- how the object is often not placed against the illusion of space, but instead against the paper itself, how simple dense forms are illuminated and somehow partially dissolved by light.

 

The Figure, Both Living and Carved-

Of course, much is made of Wendy's figures, both the living ones she does in quick sittings, and the detailed ones she does from statues.  And much should be made of them!  Combined, they embody much of what we see in her other subjects- a nuanced control of wet-into-wet values, dissolved edges that demonstrate a strong use of the paper, and an attention to precision and detail.

The video I shared earlier indicates a leisurely painting process, with her sitting in a studio alone with a model, focused on her work, but from my conversation with her, her experience actually seems rather different.  She's normally (or atleast often), painting in a group setting, much as many of us would be if we were painting from a live model.  So her position can sometimes be fixed in terms of composition.  The model moves through a variety of poses, some very short and others much longer.  As I noted earlier, shorter poses are done wet on dry, to allow for some control of form, given the constraints of time.  For longer poses (up to a 1/2 hour), she wets the paper, preserving highlights where needed, and then goes about creating her soft edges, moving into harder edged work as it dries.  Then she'll rewet as need be, to finish the composition.  All of this affects her approach- the logistics of the event matter in terms of the final product and how she approaches the painting process.

edit- December 2021

Here’s a quick timelapse video where you can see her working on one of these studies!

Truthfully, I've never seen anyone paint figures this way, and it's very alluring to consider.  Time is limited, and I can only imagine intense focus is required.  When I've worked in similar situations, such as when painting plein air and the sun is setting or the wind is picking up, at it's best I've really thrived on the flurry of attentive action needed.  Things must be reduced to their essentials, and wet-into-wet work comes to the forefront out of necessity.  I asked her about the "in the moment" process for the figures, and she had this to say, “(For the figures) there is a huge amount of loss of control.  I could be far more controlled, but it is exciting to try to coax the watercolor into the right place, and I like the way it looks when it works...  I love it when it looks right, when it is obviously right, sort of as though it was pre-determined to be that picture.  When there are marks that look like marks but also depict the image exactly as it should be.  I like there to be a combination of clumsy and elegant painting, and for it to be visually interesting as well as appealing.”

What's very striking to me is to see how this plays out when married to the clear precision we get when she paints statues.  There's clearly more detail (she can take as long as she wants!), but there's also almost an intentional injection of ambiguity, of softness, here and there.  If it's too controlled, too static, the composition begins to bore.  The goal isn't to demonstrate control, but to evoke the feeling that the statues came from a living human being.

Here we can see a collection of her work from a showing at a gallery back in 2011. Love seeing the diversity! Scroll the video and you’ll get a few shots of the paintings in context. Some of them are HUGE! She recently posted on Instagram (where it is well worth following her— she posts mini videos and such all the time), and it was a painting that was large enough to be done on two pieces of paper, presented side by side with just a little seam between them. Very ambitious work.

Although I don't think it was intentional at all, what's fascinating to me is to see these various figures done from life, and to see how clearly they almost replicate the statues, rather than the other way around! 

:;;;