the art: surreal + symbolic

...MORE Surreal Artwork by
Chris Eisenbraun.

  • Surreal ink sketch (2012): "Soliloquy."
  • Surreal pencil drawing (2012): "A Natural Pearl In My Careless Hand."
  • Surreal ink doodle (2012): "Tenuous Minor (A Flatted Third)."
  • Pencil art (2011): "Just Passing Through."
  • Complex sketch (2010): "Whisper To The Thunder."
  • Pencil artwork (2009): "The Bus To (Pomona); King To Queen's Rook 13."

  • The Drawing Board Blog:
    "My World Is Round."
    part I - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

    Artist précis.

    STARTED: Oct. 07, 2012.
    COMPLETED: July 26, 2013.
    FINAL UPDATE: Aug. 13, 2013.

    I "think" that this is one of the MOST successful forays my pencil has made into the subconscious landscape ...to date. I can FEEL the accumulated layering of meanings available to ALL of the symbols populating the paper. Crazy beautiful. It is all so incredibly thick and potent. Just to try and portray ONE of these symbols on purpose would have been heavy-handed in the extreme. I've tried it. Really. The dreaming mind does this kind of thing... so elegantly ...and so naturally: speaking in symbols... quite... succinctly. I want to do this AGAIN.

     

  • Artist blog: the drawing starts here...

    POSTED: Jan. 04, 2013 | ART BLOG: Oct. 07, 2012

    Yowza. Shhhhh.

    Ready to START ANOTHER WORK OF ART... I could feel Marilyn Monroe floating around in the back of my mind, somewhere towards the end of drawing "A Natural Pearl In My Careless Hand". A photo clipped from a newspaper article kept tickling my thoughts. Marilyn Monroe is such a MAGNIFICENT symbol on soooo many layers: tragic beauty/mysterious death; a celebrated beauty of impact... even decades after her death (similar to Cleopatra); a dated beauty of a bygone style (the fleetingness of beauty); blonde sexuality (a prize/goal concept); etc., etc., etc. AND, the real beauty is that you don't HAVE to know WHO this particular woman is for the symbol to work in this drawing. That's the BEST part. It could be just A Sexy, Blonde Bombshell. Sorry. I KNOW what I mean, I just don't have the time to phrase it eloquently. That's not my job: writing words. My job is drawing them. LOL. Joseph Campbell would be much better at it ...and Freud could spin you a theory, or two, involving SOMEBODY's mother. LOL. Anyway. Back to the drawing. As a PLUS, add in the "shhhh" portion of the symbol (and even MORE layers accumulate). You can begin to see why this symbol started tantalizing my subconscious. It SPEAKS loudly. Can you believe how many layers come to mind INSTANTLY? No thinking at all. The photo has been sitting in the bottom of my photo box just gathering dust for a while now. But Marilyn wasn't the only symbol that leaked up from down under. LOL. A fire destroyed building has been on my mind too, curling around the edges... dancing with Marilyn. Go figure. A newspaper photo of a burned hotel came out of the box too. Something about the combination felt right BUT the photo wasn't fitting behind the stairs too well. It's like my mind was hungry for something fire-y but I didn't know what. Soooo I went searching. I found a fireman on a free fireman's wallpaper blog. This was a GREAT choice with LOTS of potential. Now the artistic conversation has started, the words are on the paper.... it's time for the pencils to go to work.

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  • Posted Jan. 04, 2013

    Here's looking at you kid.

     

    The annual artist retreat is a beautiful way to recharge the artistic imagination and re-connect with personal depths. BIGtime. It is also a time to stretch artistic muscles, let the imagination REALLY soar...and DRAW. I wish I had MORE penciled in groundwork to show but MOST of the work was behind the scene/setting up the drawing. Just as well. Doing this part of the drawing involves bringing into play a completely different way of seeing/thinking which is really hard to pick up and put down in an-hour-here-and-an-hour-there sort of increments. You are looking at negative space as much as positive, trying to fit everything into place properly. AND, no matter how many times you look at something AND no matter how hard you try to SEE it... you will find things you missed the first twenty look-sees. Ugh. At one point I looked up into the eyes of the girl in "Curiouser and curiouser: 3.1415926535897". The drawing is hanging on the wall of my studio. That is when it REALLY came home how much my pencil technique has evolved. Wow. The two drawn eyeballs are worlds apart. That is SO COOL. Blew my mind. I feel the same. I feel like I'm doing the same thing now as then. Drawing exactly the same. Yeah right. Not really, LOL. Sometimes it's good to touch base with how far you've come. Anyway. Back to the surREAL artwork. As of this moment I am using just six pencils. I picked out some of my lightest graphite and set the background scale of light to dark ratio (which MUST account for the fact that the furthest black CANNOT be as dark as the closest black is going to be). Make sense? It's a perspective AND reality thang. Black is not black when it's really far away. Just like white is rarely pure white, it's usually (actually) some shade of grey. Test it for yourself. Take something BLACk... go outside and hold it up in front of your face. Find something that you think/see as black in your surroundings. Look at the two things. Hold the colors together, side-by-side. SEE. The further away the other black is... the less black it is. It becomes a dark grey. It's crazy baby. BIGtime. Anyway. Happy New Year!
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  • INDIVIDUAL BLOG POSTS: "My World Is Round."

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