Surrealist Automatism Drawing with Oil Pastels | Art Education

Surrealist artists employed various playful techniques called 'games' to access the unconscious mind and create art free from conscious control, including automatic drawing (unconscious mark-making), frottage (rubbing objects to create textures), grattage (pouring paint and mineral spirits), exquisite corpse (collaborative drawing), and the paranoiac-critical method (inducing paranoia to surrender control).

Surrealists developed techniques to access the unconscious. André Masson created automatic drawing—painting rapidly according to impulses without pre-existing plan, with forms emerging as signs representing something. Joan Miró developed intuitive signs where forms are never abstract but always represent something. Max Ernst invented frottage (rubbing) in 1925, creating images from surface impressions, which enlarged his hallucinatory powers. Raoul Hausmann developed photomontage, creating new unity from disparate elements revealing war and revolution chaos. Antonin Artaud directed Surrealist research office, addressing Dalai Lama and Buddhists seeking wisdom for contaminated European minds.

Decalcomania is a surrealist technique developed by Oscar Dominguez in the 1920s to visualize unconscious thoughts and dreams. The complete process involves: (1) Making glue paint by mixing craft glue with liquid watercolor; (2) Applying paint to folded Duralar film and spreading it with fingers; (3) Creating patterns by pressing or using tools to make open areas; (4) Drying on film or pressing onto absorbent paper; (5) Searching patterns for hidden imagery like faces or animals; (6) Tracing contours with fine-point markers; (7) Using light and dark markers to emphasize surrealistic images. This technique combines chance-based pattern creation with intentional artistic interpretation.

Surrealism in visual arts almost immediately split into two camps reflecting Breton's manifesto. The first camp emphasized dreams and Freudian concepts of dredging the unconscious, producing artists like Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalí who painted realistically but created dreamlike imagery. The second camp stressed pure psychic automatism, leading to abstraction through automatic techniques. Surrealists developed automatic techniques that would profoundly influence later movements: automatic drawing involves sitting with a pencil on paper, clearing preconceptions, and moving continuously without lifting until done—drawing from the deeper subconscious. Exquisite Corpse is a collaborative game where artists contribute sequentially without seeing previous work, creating combined images. Decalcomania applies paint between surfaces and presses them together, creating unpredictable textures. Max Ernst developed frottage (rubbing over textured surfaces like wood grain) and grattage (scraping over materials), discovering Leonardo da Vinci had advised similar approaches. Ernst also developed oscillation—tying a paint can to a string and swinging it to dribble paint onto canvas, predating Jackson Pollock. These techniques embraced accident and chance, producing textures that look exactly like their source materials.

Max Ernst developed three key surrealist techniques. Collage involved combining seemingly impossible elements without predetermined plans, allowing subconscious guidance. Frottage (rubbing) involved placing random objects on paper and rubbing graphite over them to create unpredictable, trembling images. Decalcomania involved applying wet oil paint, placing another surface on top, and pressing to create abstract, dreamlike images. These techniques connect to Dadaism's emphasis on childlike imagination and the surrealist goal of revealing subconscious imagery. The resulting works evoke feelings of unease and uncertainty, challenging viewers' psychological comfort zones.

Oil pastels create a wax resist effect when used with watercolor, allowing artists to selectively apply paint only to areas not covered by pastel. Unlike soft pastels, oil pastels skip over paper texture and sit on top of the surface. The technique works best on cold pressed watercolor paper for its textured effect. Oil pastels can be used as an alternative to masking fluid to rescue areas of a painting that cannot be corrected with watercolor alone. White oil pastel is fully opaque and can cover mistakes effectively. The technique creates broken, scruffy effects that work particularly well for landscapes and loose, impressionistic paintings.

Oil pastels resist watercolor, creating interesting mixed media effects. Apply oil pastel lightly first, which causes it to skip across the paper leaving gaps. Then apply watercolor paint on top using an old brush (not quality brushes, as they may pick up oil and never perform the same again). This technique creates sparkle effects, particularly effective for sunsets and rocky details in scenes like snow scenes.

Oil pastels can be used to reinforce outlines and add contrast to watercolor paintings. Since oil pastel shows up clearly over watercolor, it can be used to define shapes and edges that might otherwise be lost. The technique involves lightly tracing around existing shapes with oil pastel, which will show up distinctly against the watercolor background. This method works particularly well for defining leaf edges or other organic forms.

Oil pastels can be used as a resist medium to create unique artistic effects. When applied to paper, they prevent water-based media like ink spray from adhering to those areas. The artist demonstrates this by creating flower shapes with oil pastels, then spraying with ink, which transfers onto the card while leaving the oil pastel areas unaffected. This technique creates organic, unpredictable patterns that add visual interest to mixed media projects.

Oil pastels are oil-based art supplies that blend beautifully like crayons but offer superior blending capabilities, and they work excellently with watercolors for creating vibrant outlines that resist water application; alternatively, wax-based crayons can be used for watercolor resist techniques where students create hidden designs that reveal when watercolor is applied over them.

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalytic theory, pioneered the study of the human mind and behavior from a metaphysical perspective. Unlike his contemporaries who focused on music, Freud was a passionate art enthusiast who wrote numerous essays analyzing important works of art throughout human history. His studies became the foundation for modern art movements like German Expressionism and Surrealism. Freud did not analyze artists' personalities through aesthetic perspectives but examined previously invisible components, revealing that artistic works are products of emotional conflicts, psychological issues, and repressed desires rather than mere technical manifestations. Artistic symbols reveal psychological states: deformed characters with exposed teeth and clenched fists indicate repressed aggression; large heads suggest overvaluing intelligence; small heads indicate environmental dependency and emotional vulnerability. Repeated shadows and darkness may indicate suicidal tendencies. Karen Major's Human Figure Test provides a guide for interpreting personality traits through simple human figure drawings. The absence of genitalia in artistic designs may represent signs of childhood sexual abuse. Artists may metaphorize psychological struggles through monstrous figures, where Titans devouring youth symbolize the anguish of maturity and the impotence individuals feel before life's coldness.

Despite initial appearances of Jung being a mere disciple of Freud, historical evidence shows Freud took over much more from Jung and let himself be more influenced by the latter than vice versa. Freud's foray into psychiatry, his analysis of the Schreber case, his occupation with ethnopsychology and primitive psychology, his introduction of the anal phase in psychosexual development, his development of the libido theory, his introduction of narcissism, his concept of countertransference, his technical recommendations including mirror and surgeon models, and his rule of abstinence—all these were at least partly answers to Jung's criticisms and challenges. In 1910, Freud named the newly founded journal 'Imago' after Jung's concept of the 'image,' and Freud adopted Jung's term 'complex' in 1911. The Zurich School pioneered investigation of psychosis, work that Freud and his Viennese followers largely avoided.

Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories significantly influenced surrealist artist Salvador Dali, who developed his own 'paranoiac-critical method' to transform subconscious imagery into paintings, creating works like 'The Persistence of Memory' that challenge conventional reality and explore dreams, irrationality, and hidden desires.

Sigmund Freud pioneered empirical exploration of the unconscious, assuming dreams are associated with conscious thoughts and problems. He recognized neurotic symptoms as symbolically meaningful expressions of unconscious conflicts. Using free association, analysts could reveal unconscious backgrounds. However, Jung realized this approach was limiting—he discovered one could reach the unconscious center from any starting point, not just dreams. This insight led to a fundamental shift in understanding dreams as having purposes beyond mere repression and wish fulfillment.

In 1900, Jung read Freud's book 'The Interpretation of Dreams,' which proposed that the unconscious manifests through slips of the tongue, dreams, and creative works. The task of the physician was to help the patient speak freely and analyze their words to find meaning in the images of their disturbed psyche. This book became Jung's guiding star, and he adopted the approach that therapy begins with studying the patient's personal history, as it contains the secrets that have damaged their psyche.

Frottage contoured conscious control and avoided questions of taste or skill, combining passive seeing with careful composition. These works are filled with visual puns, such as wood grain becoming leaves with veins balanced between tree trunks. Masson adopted automatism wholeheartedly, and his 1923 drawings are among surrealism's most notable products. The pen moves rapidly without conscious subject, tracing nervous lines from which emerge images sometimes captured and elaborated, sometimes left as suggestions. These drawings have organic quality from unconscious textural and sensual work. From modern psychological research, automatic writing can be compared to bird's nest construction or melody beginnings that tend toward characteristic conclusions. A melody imposes its own structure on the mind. Automatic writing can enter composition with premeditated intentions, but there is great risk of departing from surrealism if automatism ceases to flow subterraneously. A work cannot be considered surrealist unless the artist strives for total psychological reach, of which consciousness is only a small part. Freud showed that in unconscious depth there prevails absence of contradiction, new mobility of emotional blockages, atemporality, and substitution of psychic reality for external reality—all subject to the pleasure principle. Masson discovered rigid adherence to automatism led nowhere and returned to cubism in 1929. Like Ernst, Miró made triumphant use of automatism to liberate his paintings from rigid cubist representation. Miró described his process: 'I begin to paint, and while I paint, the image begins to affirm itself or suggest itself under my brush. The first stage is free, unconscious, but the second stage is carefully calculated.' He alternated between paintings where automatism was dominant and paintings with biomorphic forms. It was not only technical freedom that surrealism offered Miró, but freedom to explore dreams, childhood fantasies, and inspiration from Catalan popular art, children's art, and Bosch. The distinction between automatism and dreams, adhered to in La Révolution Surréaliste, does not apply rigidly to painting. Arp, Miró, and Ernst joyfully mixed them. Arp's dream paintings are those where illusionistic technique predominates, while Tanguy's are explorations in interior landscapes.

Surrealists developed techniques to access the unconscious. André Masson created automatic drawing—painting rapidly according to impulses without pre-existing plan, with forms emerging as signs representing something. Joan Miró developed intuitive signs where forms are never abstract but always represent something. Max Ernst invented frottage (rubbing) in 1925, creating images from surface impressions, which enlarged his hallucinatory powers. Raoul Hausmann developed photomontage, creating new unity from disparate elements revealing war and revolution chaos. Antonin Artaud directed Surrealist research office, addressing Dalai Lama and Buddhists seeking wisdom for contaminated European minds.

Automatic drawing is an artistic technique where artists create spontaneous, unpremeditated drawings without conscious thought, allowing the subconscious mind to guide the creative process; this method, associated with surrealist automatism, enables artists to access deeper psychological states and produce unexpected, meaningful imagery by removing conscious control from the creative act.

Many surrealist artists practiced automatic drawing, which is the practice of allowing hands to move freely over a canvas without conscious planning as a way to access the deep subconscious mind. This technique explores unconscious creativity and automatic expression.

Automatic writing was one of the first and most important Surrealist practices, involving writing as fast as possible without allowing the mind to edit, as a direct appeal to the subconscious. Automatic drawing and collective creation techniques like 'collage of terror' and 'exquisite corpse' (le cadavre exquis) allowed participants to create surreal works without conscious control. Frottage, developed by Max Ernst, involved rubbing graphite over paper covering various objects to create magical patterns. These techniques, similar to inkblot psychological tests, revealed what the subconscious might communicate through chance and texture.