Jim Charter <jrc### [at] msncom> wrote in message
news:3f8f4905@news.povray.org...
> 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.

Yes, I found two distinctly different lines of comparison going on in my
judging; surrealism - "the Movement", and surreal - "the Look".  Having no
formal artistic background or education, surrealism was just a word I'd
heard thrown about alot in the sixties, but I didn't really know anything
about it. I'd always liked Dali & Magritte, but I'd never thought about why.
To me it was just a look, or effect. Cool, but meaningless (well, not
entirely meaningless, I found several of Dali's works to make quite definite
statements).

At the beginning of the round, to learn more, I first started looking at
surrealist works by several artists, but that seemed like a dead end. I
didn't want to just copy something someone had already done. Then I started
reading about Breton's interest in dreams and expressing the subconscious,
and about the artists themselves, and that was much more interesting.  I
read about one artist (don't remember now who, might have been Ernst) who
began his works by dropping bits of string, then tracing the patterns.
These gave me insight into the ideas behind the movement, and helped me
develop my own entry, but when it came to judging, it was obvious that the
Movement  took a back seat to the Look.  I think I probably ended up judging
basically on Look, but giving a good nod to images that seemed to underscore
the Movement. ( After all, even if it IS dead, it was still the topic...)

> Your entry, Awakening, I thought was an energetic and inventive approach
> to the topic.

Thanks.

<snip> 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. <snip>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.

Yes, I had already decided the only place chance could work effectively was
in the object selection, and even there I was limited, because I had to make
the objects first, which involved a conscious action on my part. I did make
several objects that I got the ideas from dreams I had, but only one of them
actually ended up in the image (the butterfly). I had to restrain myself
from using some of them simply because I liked them, and stick to my method
of drawing associations from random renderings. (And it was such a beautiful
pair of binoculars!)

> I thought Shay's entry, The Venue, also was very good.

For this round I had trouble fitting it into either the Look or the Movement
(although your analysis makes me look at it as much more inclined toward
Movement...)  but yes, it is a fascinating piece.  As I put in my comment,
it had a deja-vu feeling, which was kind of scary after reading the text.  I
later decided the shape was what felt familiar, while the colors give it an
emotional tone.  I played with it in PSP some (sorry Shay...) , changing the
color balance changed the whole feel, but retained the deja-vu.
NON_POV RELATED NOTE: I think it would make a very interesting sculpture,
with the shape done very large but separated from the background so that
someone could walk around or through it. Then have it lit so that depending
on viewing angle the shape or the background changed colors.

<snip>It brings Duchamp's, The Large Glass, to mind, especially with
> the emphasis on what is inscrutible and private.

Not familiar with that one, have to look it up...

 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.

Agreed, and his avoidance of banality is not limited to surrealism ;-)

<snip>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.

Yes, another simple but nice image. I hadn't mentioned it in my previous
post, but I thought it was quite good.

<snip> 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".

Yep, there's my "Movement" & "Look".  Amazing how the low culture is the
popular and the high culture is labelled officially "dead".  But then, my
background is all in music, so nothing new there... "serious" music has
always been an also-ran to popular music...

<snip> 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.

Another relationship I hadn't thought of as surrealistic, but as you say,
the later influences... and add to that the influence of computers &
ray-tracing...  I don't imagine there would be many images like that if
artists were still restricted to canvas & brushes...

> Well, this is getting a bit long.

Yes, I haven't typed this much in months...

You mentioned in your miro.textfile randomness & process.  Mind providing
some insight into how you arrived at your image?

RG

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