As a neurodivergent individual, I have always found reality and the world around me downright confusing. My senses are heightened to often overwhelming levels, and I find communicating with others challenging. I think that this is a big reason why I enjoy surrealism so much - reality is distorted and portrayed in weird and interesting ways.
Since I was a teenager, I have loved the work of Camilla D'Errico (@camilladerricoart). I like the dreamy and colourful atmosphere she creates in her paintings, and the blend of anime elements with surrealism. Many of her paintings have a fairly analogous colour pallette and often include animals, using the colour scheme and animals as symbolism for her emotional experiences whilst leaving the painting also open to interpretation by the viewer.
I am particularly drawn to her paintings where some aspect of the character is distorted, such as the hair being a drippy mass. I relate to this in the sense that I often feel 'damaged', empty, otherworldly, or disconnected from my own body whilst also feeling overwhelmed and irritable. The intense rainbow colour palettes often used for these paintings further communicates the sense of sensory overwhelm to me. I appreciate that I can see my own experience in these paintings.
Even when the artist has drastically different experiences and inspirations to myself, I feel that it is easy to see my own self and experiences in their work.
One example is this painting titled La Jardiniere by Carlos Sablon Perez, where the head of the person has been replaced by a tree. I relate to visual representations of being 'inhuman' in some way, yet still living a human life. To me, the title of this painting would imply that the woman in the painting exists less as a person, and more of a decorative object designed to make the flowers and plants look more pretty, reducing her to a part of the scenery.
Whilst I could talk for ages about the way that women are portrayed in various forms of media, I relate to the idea of kinda looking like other people, doing what I can to act like other people, but still being treated totally different due to me coming across as 'weird' for reasons I cannot control.
The painting named The Magic of Modern Age by Bagus Triyono depicts the sheer volume of information that people have access to nowadays with the ways that technology has developed and continues to develop. It is easy for this information to be skewed of incorrectly interpreted, causing people to be misled without them even knowing.
The intensity and motion of this painting is something I feel represents the chaos and racing thoughts in my mind, how my head is kind of swallowed up by this and how the racing thoughts influence my emotions and perception of reality.
I love the sense of sheer chaos in Hikari Shimoda's (@hikarishimoda) painting Hiro No Jirenma, depicting how we desire a 'hero' at times of great stress and strain whilst the world burns around us, but nobody considers the strain placed on the 'hero'.
Whilst the way that I relate to this is not the intended message of the painting, I relate to it in the sense that neurotypical expectations are constantly placed upon me. I am constantly expected to perform the way people want me to, and I am expected to accommodate everyone around me constantly whilst being very rarely accommodated by others.
This constant performance is exhausting and damaging to my self image, especially when I am also constantly processing all the details of my surroundings (lights, textures, sounds etc), and processing the billion thoughts always whizzing around in my head.
Over the coming months, I intend to explore ways to visually represent the ideas of feeling 'inhuman/alien' in a typical human world, as well as visually representing the sensory overwhelm I experience. I want my work to have an underlying sense of my daily experience in general, as if being viewed through my own eyes and mind. From there, I want to explore various specific experiences, such as the difficulties I have with communication or the way that initiating tasks can have larger consequences (such as mould growing on old food, rubbish piling up, rushing to meet deadlines).