visions and imaginings

August 4, 2006 11:18 AM

Surreal, fantastic realist, psychedelic and visionary artists, sculptors and forum. Sites created by Jon Beinart.
posted by nickyskye (8 comments total)

The first two links won't load properly for me, nor will Beinart's drawings page. Cute toddlerpedes, though.
posted by jack_mo at 11:59 AM on August 4, 2006

Sorry it's hard to load jack_mo.The url is:
http://surrealartforum.com/artlinks.htm

It's really worth seeing, hope you are able to visit the site.

Google's result, for "surreal art forum", first link listed. Possibly Google's cached version of the url might be easier for you?

Perhaps putting the url for the forum link into Coral might help?

The forum url is:
http://surrealartforum.com/

Hope something there is helpful for you.
posted by nickyskye at 12:17 PM on August 4, 2006

drat, just realised you can see the forum but not the main gallery links or Beinart. In case Coral is a help, the Jon Beinart url is:
http://jonbeinart.com/
posted by nickyskye at 12:20 PM on August 4, 2006

The link to all the "Juxtapos" type artists is useful. I like this kind of stuff, except the art that gets to close to "fantasy" art. In any case, this kind of work always strikes me as cannabis-inspired (not that there's anything wrong wth that) and I have a snobbish aversion to calling it Surrealism, because that movement has a political and philosophical coherence to it - still, even - and doesn't just mean art that's weird and qrotesque and often based on unusual juxtapositions (hence the art 'zine's title).
posted by kozad at 12:22 PM on August 4, 2006

Thanks for the links. This is definitely up my alley.

And Kozad, while Surrealism certainly started out its life as a specific art movement with manifestos, etc., in the vernacular this stuff is definitely surreal (lower case vs. upper case, perhaps?)
posted by MythMaker at 4:11 PM on August 4, 2006

kozard, Interesting thought about the political impact of Surrealism. The surreal juxtapositions in a number of the sites linked on that gallery page do seem to have a powerful, possibly political, visual punch. Naturally, the world is a different place than it was when the first wave of Surrealist artists came on the scene but these paintings...well, I find them powerful.

Like Laurie Lipton's amazing work. Timothy Cummings' paintings are edgy too in a number of ways. In that they take American Folk Art and Victoriana to some dark new level, I think they are political. The site is also a jumping off point to a lot of other artists' visions.
posted by nickyskye at 4:26 PM on August 4, 2006

Yeah, good points M.M. and nickyskye...perhaps I should just shut up and live with the lower case surreal...that word works for lots of things, I guess...and as far as the political impact of Surrealism...well, in the end it certainly didn't have much.

As Kurt Vonnegut put it in 2003,

When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.
posted by kozad at 1:24 PM on August 5, 2006

Problem with the genre, as with much arts, is that it either takes itself too seriously or tries too hard to be outrageous. Or, conversely, is the stuff of amiable fraud (Dali comes to mind). Too tiresome. Give me Bosch of give me death.

That said, I do like Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, but if you want to see some of the most interesting work turning up these days, check out higher rent children's books. I refer you to the remarkable Russian illustrator Gennady Spirin, among others.

(For good humored adulter jokes, consider Michael Speaker. His Computer Gods can be had for a reasonable price.)
posted by IndigoJones at 12:34 PM on August 6, 2006