Joan Miró: Surrealist Dreamscape

• Surrealism was an art movement that emerged due in part to the art world's fascination with scientific discoveries. In the early part of the 20th Century psychology was still in its early stages and a lot of the ideas going around about the human mind and how it worked was not much more than sophisticated guess-work. Scientists like Sigmund Freud attempted to make sense of it all and formulated theories that would later be largely discredited. Learning about the influence these early theories had on artists gave us an opportunity, therefore, to discuss the scientific method, and the way in which all scientific truths are provisional, waiting around to be replaced by new discoveries and more refined ways of understanding the world and ourselves in it.
• Students looked at the work of Catalan painter Joan Miró. They attempted to reproduce his murky, dream-like backgrounds by mixing secondary colors into a swirling soup of muted tones. To this they added bizarre arrangements of shapes, lines and colors. Inspired by the artists use of recurring imagery, the students' drawings are derived from multiple combinations of the same simple designs. Finally they colored these in so that some spaces were opaque and others remained transparent.