Yes, #deviantlySurreal is sleeping... but, unusually, it doesn't seem to be dreaming.

I submitted a fairly long text to the magazine by way of an 'article' on surrealism some time last year expecting it to appear in the magazine at some stage. It never happened. Of course, the article was no more than a Jonathon Meades style canter through the field, more or less opining that surrealism was a deeply trivial affair that died some time in the 1940s or 50s, only to be resurrected in advertising, popular music videos, film, and the covers and even texts of science fiction novels, particularly those of J.G.Ballard... [link] so it isn't as if you've missed much. However, I do miss the magazine itself and bemoan this lack of editorial action. Submitting a blog is one of the view things I could do to correct this omission.

Take this 'alien landscape by night' , for instance... Is it surrealism?  Many would say "No, it's merely Impressionist!" A defensible position, certainly. But what about this ? Obviously a direct tribute to Max Ernst, one of the great sons of surrealism, the fathers being the poets and dadaists of a previous decade, mainly Paul Elouard, Francis Picabia, Andre Breton, the self styled Comte de Lautreamont, who said that there was beauty in the chance conjunction of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table [something he had actually seen in a pawn shop window!] and Marcel Duchamp, who's 'Fountain' [a urinal lying on its back and signed 'R.Mutt'] was rejected even by the other modern artists of the day and who eventually announced in 1927 that he had 'given up art for chess' even as he was secretly working on his 'swan song', Etant Donne [link] .  And this ? Is it just a sexist exploitation piece? What about this ? Is it surreal, or merely real?

I have been rearranging reality photographically for some time now in the hope of reinvigorating visual surrealism for the digital age with arbitray distortions of reality such as this , this , this and even this .  Critics may object that these are only tricks; but then my school art master said to me once that "Salvador Dali was a trickster!", something which is undeniably true.

This blog isn't just a plug for my work or a blatant piece of self advertisement. It was designed to give the reader a flavour of what he or she has been missing since #deviantlySurreal fell into its current coma. However, I can't resist just one more attempt to lay a piece of genuine surrealism on the modern viewership: . If that wasn't really surreal then I'm about ready to give up!