Sunday Art Dialogue: Observation or Imagination?

Today I would like to discuss how artists conceive their subject matter, where do their ideas come from? This is a question about creativity, which has always fascinated me.

Does an artist discover a subject through observation of the world, or create it through imagination?

There are observation based artists such as John Constable's landscapes or Lucien Freud's portraits. They work from direct visual experiences and are concerned with recording appearances. Then there are imagination based artists like Salvador Dali and Max Ernst who created images not found in ordinary reality. They sometimes draw upon dreams, memory, symbolism and the unconscious and argue that reality extends beyond what is visible. Many years ago I had the privilege of working with Conroy Maddox who was one of the most important members of the British Surrealist movement, yet he often remains less familiar to general audiences than Dalí or Ernst. His was committed to Surrealism over many decades and believed that art should liberate the imagination rather than merely reproduce appearance and his imagery, as featured here in the splendid biography by Silvano Levy and in the work, 'The Chaos Within' given to me by Conroy for my private collection, feels as though the image emerges from an internal logic rather than external observation.

What do you think when looking at this Maddox painting?

However, one might ask Is Imagination Really Separate from Observation? Even the most imaginative artist depends on observed experience. I think that one might say observation supplies the vocabulary; imagination writes the poetry. The history of art may be viewed as a continual negotiation between what artists see and what they imagine. Surrealism, and artists such as Conroy Maddox, remind us that the unseen world of dreams, memory and unconscious association can be as powerful a source of imagery as direct observation. The question is not observation or imagination, but how each artist transforms one into the other.

Please send me your comments and images to continue the discussion.

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