A rough sketch I just did after seeing the image in my mind about an hour ago. So this is a Surrealism day, I guess. Someone in 17th century costume about to get into a Prius is pretty surreal - (unless of course said someone is going to a sci-fi convention or a Renaissance faire).
But I'm not doing either; this is just one of my visions that I deemed good enough to set down on paper. I get lots of them; people ask "where do you get your ideas?" Ideas are the easy part, execution is the challenge. I've been reflecting on my own creative process lately. I hear my '60s youth saying "Trust your gut," which is all fine and dandy, but my current old lady says, "But for God's sake let your head exercise some judgement!"
Whenever I lie down to sleep, dozens of images rush through the field behind my closed eyelids. Even if I could remember all of them, most are basically worthless as picture starters. I choose to realize, i.e., make real, a select few. They vary widely but the ones I keep have a foreground and a background, often one or more human or quasi-human figures, and the content is at least marginally coherent, even if bizarre.
And so I continue to make Surrealist artwork, although these days it's interspersed with other stuff based solely on external reality. (See my previous post about a digital piece I'm working on.) I've never attempted to "explain" my Surrealist images, but while I do them they feel like a different dimension of reality. But it's a dimension that I recognize as related somehow to my own personal idiosyncracies; the task I set myself as an artist is to make something that might speak to others as well.
So this one is for those of you who, like me, always loved the stories of the old highwaymen of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe. Their clothes were rad! And a full moon with clouds scudding across it is just too dramatic and evocative of adventure, romance, legendary deeds, to ignore. And I've always wanted to buckle a few swashes.
Other surrealists' works, with the possible exception of Rene Magritte's, are often shocking or slightly repellent. Mine are pretty tame, I guess, compared to Remedios Varo or Max Ernst. And I'm beginning to realize there's a clown buried deep in my psyche; maybe I'm the first of the Comic Surrealists. I could do worse, I suppose.