gonzo wrote:
> Ok, just got back from a couple weeks diving & lobster hunting so I'm
> feeling much better now...
> 
> My personal top 10 (no relation to official results)...
> Miro -  A surreal portrait of a surrealist artist, reflecting an environment
> of shapes and colors symbolizing humanity, including the artist himself,
> just as an artist reflects himself and his environment in his work. A
> beautifully recursive concept. Artistically superb, and technically
> excellent. My top pick.
> 

Ron thanks for the compliments and the vote.  I found that while working 
on my entry, the topic raised many questions that I couldn't really 
answer.  That may be in part why I have been more quiet this round when 
it comes to commenting on the winners.  I never really found a coherent 
way to judge the entries.

Your entry, Awakening, I thought was an energetic and inventive approach 
to the topic.  And you encountered some interesting issues.  By looking 
for a way to incorporate chance into your image-making you highlighted a 
couple of things.  One, that raytracing is primarily a depictional 
paradigm.  Thus the raytracing artist is usually confronted with the 
decision of what things to put into the picture.  Furthermore the scene 
language actually implements this part of the process and makes it 
potentially subject to automation.  Second, that any attempt to 
introduce chance into the creative process must necessarily be only 
partially successful. The use of chance must be contained within a 
structure that you do make decisions about.  This is exactly the same 
problem that early surrealists who experimented with chance came up against.

I thought Shay's entry, The Venue, also was very good.  It seemed to 
point to the relationship between what is systematic and what is 
arbitrary in the world, and seemed to draw an analogy with that 
dichotomy and the contrast between what is public, and what is intensely 
private, in experience.  Interpreting the meaning did rely on the 
accompanying text and the text together with the image was engaging yet 
arcane.  It brings Duchamp's, The Large Glass, to mind, especially with 
the emphasis on what is inscrutible and private.  It seems that Shay is 
trying very hard to forge a conceptual approach with his raytracing and 
wanted to avoid, at any cost, terrain where the banalities of surrealism 
intersected with the hackneyed effects of the medium.

One of the themes that runs through the history of surrealism is an 
interest in the eye as an organ of perception, and its relationship with 
other senses and means of perception.  Throughout surrealism the 
dominance of the eye is accented with a relish for tactile effects. 
Strong lighting using the Renaissance 1/3 rule is repeatedly used to 
give us tactile hovering forms in a three dimensional space.  Raking 
light sets off textured surfaces. Collages are composed from finely 
crosshatched engravings. Tactility is a complex quality because it 
requires our sense of the body as perceiver.  Yet it can also be 
referenced indirectly, that is, through vision.  I thought that 
Still-Life with Flower by Michael Hunter recalled this aspect of 
surrealism very well.  The strong lighting sets the form of the flower 
in sharp relief while the granular texture of the foreground plane is 
carefully represented.  Another image that makes use of surface texture 
to heightened effect is Fungi by Richard Massey.  The winning image by 
Casey Uhrig also engages our sense of tactility with its stark, 
overexposed rendering of form, its robust three-dimensionality, and the 
implied prickly surface of the "world".  Another interesting encounter 
with tactility is the image, Blue Cone, by Kelemen Csaba.
Content to be primarily, even whimsically, an abstract construction, the 
image is strikingly beautiful.  Subtle surface effects keep the 
background of saturated yellow under control, (the most difficult color 
to handle, many painters would contest), while a scintillating cloud of 
spheres spray the picture space, prickling the skin and dazzling the
eye. In another vein we have Veijo Vilva's, Before the First Concert. 
Immaculate surfaces please the eye while exquisitely formed musical 
instruments reference the ear as an organ of pleasure.

Though I can't recall, I almost certainly voted in favor of "surrealism" 
on the topic suggestion system. The humanism of the topic would have 
appealed to me.  But as I began work on my own entry I suspected that 
the topic might prove troublesome when providing a focus for the 
contest.  The problem it seemed to me is that surrealism lived as a high 
Art movement, informed many other art movements, then lived on as a form 
of popular culture.  With its multivalent relationship with both high 
and low culture, it is impossible for me to separate out all the 
possible influences that inform my concept of "surrealism".

I remember an art history course I took with the painter, Bruce Boice. 
During a break he was describing his teenage son's artwork.  He 
characterized its album cover style as "a kind of adolescent seeking of 
truth-in-strangeness".  I always thought that that comment summarized 
what is an enduring attraction of surrealist art, the sense of 
alienation, strangeness, and intense emotion combined with a seeking of 
"truth". One of the ways that this is manifest is with the creation of 
an atmosphere of malevolence, malaise, pregnant anticipation, 
foreboding, or density. Two images that are notable for recalling this 
quality are Ordutemps by Anne Monti and DaliLove by Helene Dumur.  In a 
more literary way, the need to confront the absolute through the choice 
of subject illustrates these same characteristics in Death of a Mind by 
Florian Kastell.  The convoluted subject illustrated in Harvest by Steve 
Paget signals a similar intention.  Ice on Fire by Elwin Way makes a 
depictional attempt to embody a conceptual dichotomy.

The winning image, Povworld, reflects yet another theme that I associate 
with the later influences of surrealism.  That is to say themes about 
the relationship of the geometric and mechanical to the structure of the 
organic and the natural.

Well, this is getting a bit long.

-Jim

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