For many artists, though not all as we saw with Marlene, art begins as a way in which to express themselves, but for the young Dylan art began as a peaceful escape from
the rowdiness that surrounded him. A quiet child, Dylan frequently found other children in his classrooms to be a bit too noisy, something which always made him feel quite anxious. It wasn’t long however before he found a remedy to this that would stay with him forever, a discovery that was made when his teacher came into the classroom with easels (frames, typically made of wood, that are mainly used to support canvases to paint on) and paper. Suddenly ‘the room fell silent’ Dylan says, ‘and that was my first experience with art; a peaceful one’. Though, as you’ll discover, over time Dylan sought, through his cubism, not to escape from reality but find new ways in which to engage with and interpret it. ‘Language on its own hasn’t evolved enough to allow us to describe this reality’ Dylan tells me, ‘I studied Quantum Physics for five years because I was fascinated by the world. I wanted to find the glitch in the Matrix so to speak.’ What that glitch is, where it lies and how such an understanding might help us in our own lives, however, is now what you dear reader will join me, with the help of Dylan’s work, to find out.
After having his first taste for what art had to offer, Dylan began to engross himself in oil painting, where he naturally began to paint the world in square shapes using bright colours. Yet for the young Dylan this was a conflicting experience. Growing up surrounded by 18th century classical paintings – a genre of art which was particularly realistic in style – and feeling unable to paint in the more traditional way that he felt he should have; Dylan began to reject his own work. This was all to begin to change however, when one day he was sent home with a book on Vincent Van Gogh. ‘It was a life-changing experience’ he tells me, ‘I grew to learn that art was a personal thing’. Although it would be some time before Dylan came to embrace and develop upon his cubist works that he produced growing up, this was a step in the right direction. For it was through works such as expressionist Van Gogh and later the cubist Marc Chagall that Dylan looked to find new ways to interact with reality – and ones which extended beyond our 3-dimensional views of the world.
Some of you might remember (I refer back to previous editions a lot, since much like art, they’re all connected in one way or another – so it’s worth subscribing if you haven’t already!) in our previous edition’s ‘Artworks from History’ section, how we observed a major shift in the art world that took place during in the mid-nineteenth century. In this regard, and for those readers who might be new here, for millennia art was considered as something that was used to primarily depict people, indoor objects, and religious iconography. To paint an empty landscape or something that was deemed to be unrealistic was unheard of and might even, particularly during the medieval era, be considered blasphemous. As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth century however, it was clear that new ideas conceived during the Enlightenment concerning reasoning were beginning to supplant those of strict religious thought, something which was soon to be reflected in the arts.
During the mid-nineteenth century, something quite strange began to happen within the art world – people began to go outside. This was known as en plen-air or ‘open- air painting’ movement, where art studios were brought outdoors. Suddenly, artists, namely that of Van Gogh, not only began to capture how their surroundings looked but also how they sounded and felt – be it a roaring river ora swirling Starry Night. Such pieces were utterly ground- breaking and the expressions they produced of the world thanks to these sensations and experiences were totally different to what had gone before. Of course, the swirls, patterns, and bright colours they portrayed weren’t realistic in the conventional sense, but they weren’t completely unrealistic either. This was because they represented the artist’s subjective standpoint and were created as a result of their emotions; a blue sky for example, may be painted red in order to express feelings of intensity in the same way that a normal looking jaw may be elongated slightly to project the sense of sound (Van Gogh’s ‘The Scream’ anyone?). Gradually, through this new style of thought and subsequent creativity, artists began to use the outside world and their experiences within it to explore, express and explaintheir own inner thoughts. Much like the psychologists surrounding them, an increasing number of artists were beginning to ask questions, chiefly: what goes on inside our minds and how might we express those intricate thoughts?
As we’ve explored, one way in which artists began to attempt to explain their unseen underlying influences and ideas was through the growing surrealist movement of the 1920s. Yet what in fact preceded this movement, and what was perhaps the real successor to Gough’s expressionism, was Cubism. Ignited by Pablo Picasso at the turn of the twentieth century, Cubism sought to reshape the reality of our surroundings in the form of 2-dimensional abstractions, namely through squares and rectangles.Of course, many cubists created such pieces based upon their thoughts and feelings which seemed to arise from their subconscious minds. But unlike the surrealists, who attempted to directly construct the dreamlike landscapes of their subconscious realms, Cubists sought to reconstruct their own reality – with their seemingly subconscious thoughts and feelings just happening to assist them in moulding it. What is perhaps most striking about this difference in thought between the two seemingly similar genres, however, is the fact that this divide can still be seen to impact upon how surrealist and cubist artists work today.
In the previous article, we learnt that Psychosurrealism’s artworks directly stem from his dreamlike, subconscious realm, so it’s particularly illusory in style. Similarly, so toois Dylan’s artwork determined by his underlying thoughts and experiences – what Freud might have once called his subconscious. ‘Most, if not all, of my work is influenced by my mind and the state of it’ he tells me. ‘Emotional response to events in life that might be small or huge are reflected
in my art. Why so many of my paintings portray people smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol? Well, this stems from childhood memories. I did use to smoke but quit the habit 13 years ago. As a child everybody in my world at the time smoked cigarettes. I also remember being taken to the local social club by my parents in the days you could smoke in pubs and restaurants.
Obviously, these events played heavy in my memory and are now portrayed within my art’. Though, like a true cubist, his art isn’t illusory in style like PS’s as it isn’t intentionally a depiction of a subconscious or dreamlike place. Instead, Dylan utilises his thoughts and feelings, through cubism, to reinterpret his own reality in a simplified way – ‘the mind is pretty complex and simple at the same time’, he says, ‘but we can take its complexity and simplify it’.
It may seem difficult at first to grasp a Cubist piece and to comprehend where the ‘simplicity’ within these works come from, but to break down our viewpoint in this way can indeed make our reality more easy to understand.Our world is full of immensely intricate curves and shapes for example, I mean you wouldn’t expect a small child to understand what a car is just by looking at one, never mind put one together. But what if you could break down that car into a few small simple blocks? Suddenly you might find that the child not only realises what they’re looking at but is also able to construct a tiny car for themselves (sounds like a good business idea - maybe I’ll invent something like that one day and call it ‘Lego’!).
Of course, Dylan’s reinterpretation of reality is a lot more complicated than that of a child reimagining a car through Lego bricks, but the ethos remains the same. For Dylan’s work still represents an interaction with reality; one which deconstructs his 3rd dimensional view of the world and reconstructs it in the second dimension based upon his own subjective thoughts and feelings. As he says: ‘The world for me is like a jigsaw puzzle. When unmade it’s a mess, but when it’s back put together it’s perfection... No matter how messed up the world is, it always, in some way or another, comes back together just enough to hold a picture’.
Interestingly he sometimes represents this interaction by hosting a number of faces, as he says: ‘My many faces that sometimes confuse those who view my art is merely the movement or the mind interacting with reality’. Though such interactivity is also reflected by his vibrant use of colour. On this point he mentions: ‘Colour is a powerful, spiritual thing... My art begins with a thought. The colour is what drives that thought and raises the vibration of the mind. I know from my social media and the amount of people that have contacted me that the colours I choose mean a great deal to people struggling with certain events in life that are bringing them down’. Though, whilst Dylan’s reconstruction of reality might indeed be based upon his own view of the world, something he projects through colour, vibration and geometry, this standpoint isn’t exactly ‘subjective’ in the conventional sense or in the way that you might think it is.
To interact with reality, Dylan will often attempt to view the world through a conscious realm where he is the object, much like how we might see ourselves within a crowd or within our memories. ‘When you think about yourself, (where you are centred consciously) do you see yourself as your eyes?’ he asks. ‘In memory do you see through your eyes, or do you see your body, face etc. within a scene that may or may not have happened the way your memory depicts it? I see myself as attached but not within my body’, he says. It may seem complex, perhaps even stressful at first, to reconstruct reality in this way but intriguingly, as Dylan is keen to point out, it can actually be quite therapeutic.
When we think about our thoughts and memories, which some scientists believe to be the same thing, given that nearly all our thoughts almost instantly become memories, they are often quite fractured. This is primarily because our mind doesn’t store everything, so what, where, and how something happened, becomes increasingly splintered as time moves on. Some might even say that these splinters fall into a subconscious realm and can only be retrieved through hypnosis or surrealist art practices; hence why such works are often so hallucinatory in style.
Cubists, however, help to fit these broken pieces back together ‘like a jigsaw’, as Dylan mentioned, and so help to provide us with clarity in an increasingly confusing world and one where mental health issues are on the rise.‘We all go through times of mental tension, depression. We sometimes have no hope, but I try to portray how the mind can be your friend and how it doesn’t have to be the enemy’ Dylan tells me. ‘Consciously we can take which ever thought pops into our heads or we can reject them, but I hope my art can take those that struggle away from their worries, stress & anxiety and give them time out.’ In this sense, there are many subtle beacons of hopefulness for a better world in Dylan’s work. Take the ‘The Bucket list’ for instance; in our consumer orientated world you might think that someone’s bucket list might well include acquiring material riches, from cars and clothes to sofas and tableware, but instead his work includes more sentimental aspirations, such as ‘be nicer to people’ and ‘help others’.
‘Explain the Unexplainable’
As much as Dylan is keen to help others through his work however, and as we noted at the very beginning of this article, for him, his art has also been both a personal and scholarly attempt to interpret reality. Interestingly, something which provides his cubist works with such a great uniqueness, this is where all the bendiness on top of all the geometric shapes come from. ‘I like to bend and twist a body in my art and give it a face and present a 3 or 4 dimensional perspective of movement within one still image’ he informs me. ‘We all see in 2d whilst living in the 3rd dimension but are capable of seeing so much more via the minds eye. Metaphor plays a huge part in my paintings, for we can only explain certain things in life via metaphor, as it allows us to explain the unexplainable’.
Indeed, whether it’s from a conscious or subconscious realm and be it through paint, photography or digital means, cubists, and surrealists alike are keen, if not devout, in their quest to express what language can’t. It’s path that we all trod along in one way or another; one in which we hope to find ourselves and our place in the universe.For there are millions of us, from religious preachers to scientists, who spend years attempting to find out what this life is all about. Though, as the artists in this edition have hinted at, perhaps the answer doesn’t lie out there but within. It is a sentiment which may be best epitomised by finishing Dylan’s sentence that was quoted at the very beginning of this very article: ‘I studied quantum physics for 5 years because I was fascinated by the world. I wanted to find the glitch in the matrix so to speak...
but I ended up realising that the glitch lies within us all’.
Find more from Dylan below!
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