Surrealism | Kate McCalmont-Woods

I made a last minute decision to go to Tate Britain on Friday to see the Ithell Colquhoun and Edward Burra exhibitions before they ended yesterday.

I didn’t enjoy the Colquhoun exhibition as much as I was anticipating, and I think it was because there wasn’t much surrealism.

As I was standing in front of Scylla, a woman commented to me that she had been expecting it to be a lot bigger as it had been used so extensively in the marketing of the exhibition. I assume that she had thought that because the image was used for marketing purposes that it was an important work of Colquhoun’s and because it was important and of value, that it would be large in scale – the old perennial issue of size.

*Scylla,* 1938, oil on board, 91.4 x 61cm

‘It was suggested by what I could see of myself in a bath… It is thus a pictorial pun or double-image in the Daliesque sense – not the result of a dream, but of a dreamlike state.’

Colquhoun used the Surrealist process of decalcomania to produce a mirror image of randomly applied marks which she then used as a starting point for her work.

*Gorgon,* 1946, oil on board & its decalcomania counterpart of oil on paper

’I meant to paint a ‘Guardian Angel’ but the result of the automatism was so horrific that I had to call it a Gorgon instead’.

She also used a technique called parsemage, which involved submerging paper in water which had powdered chalk or charcoal on the surface.

These processes offered intuitive access to the unconscious mind, according to the accompanying blurb.

Colquhoun also utilised automatic drawing.

They remind me of my pen drawings in On Your Marks & Lines.

I decided to give parsemage a go – I think that you can do it with anything that can be ground to a dust – I used powdered graphite which has a slightly metallic quality to it. I was really pleased with the results.

I then remembered a post on Instagram of a potter decorating bowls by blowing bubbles. I’ve used bubbles in wet cyanotyping before, so I decided to try it with the powdered graphite. I really like the delicate lines which were created and it was fascinating watching the effect of the bubbles popping – it reminded me of looking at cells under a microscope.

I then experimented with acrylic ink – maybe I should have realised beforehand – but it failed miserably. I wanted to try again with a water based ink, but I couldn’t find them. It might offer a more effective way of creating something akin to cells, than my previous attempts, so I’ll try again when I eventually locate them.

Guilty as charged: I have form for overthinking, overworking, not knowing when to stop and basically bludgeoning a piece until there is no life left in it. My problem is that I have an expectation of how it should be. It’s not even as if I enjoy the process – it makes me frustrated, stressed, and downhearted to the point of threatening to pack it all in. So, to put an end to this way of working I need to adopt a new approach; create a new habit but one which opens up possibilities, as opposed to closing them down. Admittedly, I have already begun to experiment more recently, but it needs to become second nature.

There’s a lot to be said for drawing exercises; I’m a particular fan of continuous line drawing but the drawback (excuse the pun) is that I’m still drawing something, I’m just not allowing myself to draw it as accurately as I might otherwise want to, and so there is still an expectation as to how it should look.

Sometime ago, I watched a documentary about Maggi Hambling. She gets up at 5am every morning and with a cup of coffee and cigarette in hand, she starts her day by making a drawing – she doesn’t like the term sketch – using an ink dropper and, in this particular instance, with her eyes closed. It is a form of automatic drawing, a concept embraced by the surrealists and latterly by the abstract expressionists, which involves the artist making marks without any conscious control.

I think this is for me!

There are numerous possibilities: pencil, charcoal, ink, paint, collage, eyes open, eyes closed, different ways of holding, holding more than one, dominant hand, non-dominant hand and the list goes on.

So this is the first of my daily automatic drawings:

I used a charcoal pencil in my dominant hand and, with my eyes open, I just let it wander over the page without any conscious thought or control. Maintaining the same pressure and manner of mark-making started to become a bit tedious so I almost unconsciously varied the pressure and the way I made the marks, holding the pencil higher up so that there was less control from my hand, rocking it backwards and forwards in my hand, holding it perpendicular to the page and then on its side. It was a sensory experience in that I was aware of the feel and the sound of it: the sound of the charcoal on the paper and the squeaking and stuttering of it on the upward stroke creating broken lines, as opposed to the smooth downward marks. I then randomly smudged and blended some areas.

There are some quite interesting passages and if this is my subconscious expressing itself then I might have cause for concern! All in all, I’m pleased with what I produced because I enjoyed the process – instead of being mindful, it was mindless – and I hope that if I do this often enough I might just free myself up.