My Blue Butterfly

Leslie Campo Catalan, 2022

1232 x 768

Artist Statement:

For this project, I am exploring the concept of dreams and sleep and how dreams feel compared to the real world. Upon researching the science of sleep and artists inspired by sleep, I was intrigued by René Magritte’s surrealist art. His artwork often uses a dreamy illusive theme by incorporating both three dimensional objects and flat images in his paintings. A prominent technique in Magritte’s work is repetition, where he presented motifs in individual pictures, and also produced multiple copies of his work. His paintings reflect clarity and simplicity, but they are often very strange which shows the powerful paradox in his work. Magritte’s artwork helped me decide that I want to make a surrealist piece to best portray my experience with dreaming. Many people remember segments of their dreams and specific images, but these images may not relate to each other. Since dreams can be strange and weird, I took a surrealist approach for my project to recreate that “dream-like” feeling. Several surrealist artworks have helped me with aesthetic choices and considerations of design to relate to the conceptual aspects of my project. Above, I recreated my dream and took notes on one of my dreams and put it together in one piece.

References:
https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2019.00140

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works

Magritte, René. La Parure de l’orage. 1972. Artnet, http://www.artnet.com/artists/rené-magritte/la-parure-de-lorage-frxwiFBIrLOwkjvK-sQ0_Q2