Surrealist Games

     When a person mentions Surrealism the first person who pops into their minds is Salvador Dali and his famous painting The Persistence of Memory. Have you ever thought about how he came up with the idea for such a painting? Well, Dali and many other Surrealist artists including Max Ernst and poet Andre Breton all used games to help fuel their creativity. These games gave artists opportunities that used chance and the ridiculous in art making.
 

Some the most popular games are chain games, specifically the Exquisite Corpse. The Exquisite Corpse first started as a word game, players would sit around a table and write down an
-adjective
-noun
-adverb
-verb
-adjective
-noun
     on a piece of paper folding over the word to make sure the other players could not see what they wrote, they would unfold their paper and read the sentence aloud. Here is an example my friends and I did:
         " The boyish toad longingly crashed early Leah".
 
    Another way of creating the Exquisite Corpse is through drawing. It is the same as the word game but instead of dividing the corpse up into words, it is divided into body parts heads, torsos, and legs. Again all of this is done without letting the other players see what you drew.

   A game that I like to play is inkblot pictures. These are the same thing as doing a Rorschach test and it is a simple procedure. All you need to do is take ink or diluted paint and spread it or let it drip onto a piece of paper. While the ink is still wet take your piece of paper and fold it in half pressing down firmly. When you open up the paper you have a symmetrical image. See what visuals you can find in the inkblots and then draw what you see on top of the blot! Here are some examples I did:

 I saw a bulldog in this inkblot test that I did, I think it might have been because I think there so cute!

I did this inkblot test on the funnies section of the Sunday newspaper because I thought it might add some nice layering and color. When I looked at this inkblot I immediately saw a Chinese Dragon.

This is an example of an original Roschach Test. More information about these tests can be found on this wikipedia page



 

Here is a video I found of changing inkblot tests, how many images can you see?