Frida Kahlo is one of the most recognized painters of the modern world. She is an icon to the feminist movement and to women, even today because of the strength, love, and compassion she showed throughout her life.

She was born in Coyoacan in 1907, in Mexico City. At the age of 6 she was hit with the terribly debilitating disease of polio, and this disease severely affected  one of her legs, but she did not allow this to stop her.  She wanted to study medicine but in 1925 she was in a terrible accident.  While recovering, she began to paint the reflections of her physical and mental pain.  She is considered one of the best surrealist painters of her time and she expresses both depression and happiness.  Her themes reflect her pain, her happiness, her obsession for children, and the native folklore of her country. She once wrote “Whether my paintings are an honest expression of my being. My themes reflect my feelings, my mood swings, the profound actions that life has produced in me.”

She was married to Diego Rivera the famous Mexican muralist in 1929 and the relationship, although non conventional, was extremely passionate. Diego was everything to Frida, her lover, her universe and her man.  She became internationally known while travelling to New York with Diego and a modern day icon to the modern day woman. A woman who was strong and yet sensitive, she expressed who she was and what she felt through her paintings.

Have you ever seen the work of Tomasz Setowski? This artist specializes in fantasy art, but fantasy art as no other. Kasia Turajczyk suggests that his work is influenced by the polish illustrator Jan Marcin Szancer who died in 1973 and was a world renown childrens book illustrator, but I believe that the ethereal quality of the paintings by Tomasz Setowski are so much more. I believe Setowski must be influenced by many other artists as well to be able to attain the creativity and the imagery he is able to project in his paintings. These may come from his own inner being with little or no influence from any other painter, illustrator, or artist. Of course, I am sure much of his creativity stems from images, or stories he remembers from childhood, because all of his imagery is so childlike.

What I do know is that to fully appreciate the work of Tomasz Setowski , you need to stand  a few minutes and really observe all that goes on in his paintings, and once you do that you will believe in fairies, kings and queens, and enchanted forests. These paintings are full of optimism and happiness, this is the type of work we need more of in our lives.

Photo Via : Surrealist Fantasy Art

Rene Magritte was a Belgian artist, born at the end of the 19th century. He began to draw in 1910 when he began to take private art classes. When he was 12 his mother committed suicide, and many of his first paintings, a series of paintings of people with cloths obscuring their faces, may have been influenced from his witnessing the retrieval of his dead mothers body from the river.

In 1927 he had his first surreal exhibit and was criticized terribly for it. His failure caused him to move to Paris where he continued to show his paintings.

As it occurs in many other cases, most of the interest in his work did not occur until some time after his death. His work is mostly fantasy based, but has a somber mood and style to it. It is said that his work may have influenced the Pop, conceptual, and minimalist art movements. His work showed with younger contemporaries who later took on the fauvist and pop style.

Surrealist artists wanted their work to be a link between their minds and thoughts and the real forms of the material world. To them, object stood as a symbol for their inner reality and they used symbols and objects to represent their mind. Through their artworks and paintings, artists displayed their subconscious mind to the conscious mind. This way, these paintings and what they meant could be understood through analysis. Just as painters during the Renaissance took great care to show how people and bodies were like and they portrayed very well human proportions, surrealist artists tried to show what the mind and thoughts looked like.

There were two different ways how artists chose to show the mind. Some artists expressed them with abstract paintings (automatism) while others expressed them in symbolic tradition (realistic expression).

Artists interpreted this as referring to a suppression of the consciousness in favor of the subconscious. The automatists, who are more focused on feelings and less analytical, understood automatism to be the automatic way in which the images of the subconscious reach the conscience. They thought these images should not be burdened with meaning, so they represented them in an abstract form.

This interpretation had made the automatist see the academic discipline of art as intolerant of the free expression of feeling. They thought that abstractionism is the only way to bring the images of the subconscious to life. Automatism could be best defined as “abstract”.

Artists in this movement believed that automatism was a better way to tackle societal change than the Dada movements attack on prevailing values. The most important painters of abstract Surrealism were Joan Miro and Andre Masson.

The most representative painters of Veristic Surrealism were Salvador Dali; Rene Magritte and Max Ernst. The Belgian Rene Magritte had a good ability to paint ordinary objects in unusual contexts giving new meanings to familiar things. Max Ernst started as a Dadaist but turned to Surrealism when the Dada movement ended. With his paintings he tried to provoke the viewer to awaken moral.

Freud’s work with dream analysis became of utmost importance to the surrealists to develop methods to liberate imagination. Surrealist works of art were revolutionary and often not understood. Salvador Dali, the best representative of Surrealism, once said, ‘There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.’

Dali was a painter with outstanding painting skills. He was best known for his striking and bizarre images in his surrealist works but he also painted some realistic paintings. His painting skills are often compared to the Renaissance painters. He also experimented with the Cubist Style and was influenced by the Dada movement throughout his life.

His exhibitions of work attracted many people and he received mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from critics. He even came into conflict with his fellow surrealists over political beliefs. For this reason he was officially expelled from the Marxist surrealist group. Dali’s response to this expulsion was ‘Surrealism is me.’

Dali was widely known for his great imagination and for his affinity for doing unusual things which made people come to him. It also made some of his art lovers get annoyed as much as it did to some critics. This made people purchase his art works and he became purposed sought notorious.

The general interpretation of Dali’s ‘The Persistence of Memory’ is that soft watches debunk the assumption that time is rigid and deterministic and this is supported by other images in that work like the wide landscaping, the ants and the fly that devour the other watches.

Dali, as he explained inspired himself on camembert cheese to Saint the watches in the painting. He said that these watches were “tender, extravagant, solitary and paranoid“. Watches, just like memory, softened with the pass of time. Dali once said about the painting: “Just as I am surprised that a bank employee has never eaten a check, I am equally surprised that no other painter before me thought about painting a soft watch”.

This painting has historical significance in surrealism and is an icon within the genre. It explains the creativity and expresses the time and space between real life and the imaginary life very clearly. Dali’s painting ‘The Persistence of Memory’ illustrates clearly the style of surrealism which could not be conveyed in words. This is a painting which has brought out the actual essence of time and what makes it perfect is that it is something for which you can never find the right words.