5 Surrealist Artworks That Made Our Heart list This Week

At Arts to Hearts Project, we see a lot of art. A lot. Every theme, every subject, every medium imaginable pass through our feeds every single week portraits, landscapes, florals, food, abstracts, you name it. And every week we sit down and pick the work that genuinely got us. This week we decided to do something a little different.

This week we chose a theme ourselves and that theme was surrealism. Because why not? Why not dedicate an entire heart list to the painters who are using the strange, the dreamlike and the impossible to say things that nothing else in art can say quite as well?

Surrealism done right is one of the most exciting things in contemporary painting right now. Not shock for shock’s sake but work that uses the unreal to get at something completely true. The kind that makes you look twice and still cannot stop looking. This is our heart list for this week.

01. Parlay by Jacques de Beaufort @jacquesdebeaufort

First on our heart list this week is Parlay by Jacques de Beaufort, and this one gets you before you have even worked out what you are looking at. Three robed figures gather beneath an enormous spectral form that looms above them part face, part phantom, part something you cannot name against a burning sunset sky. It is theatrical and strange and completely impossible to look away from.

Jacques is a Delaware-born artist, filmmaker and Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Palm Beach State College in West Palm Beach, Florida, who graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 2000. His practice is deeply rooted in alchemy, esotericism and 20th century surrealism influenced by vintage science fiction book covers, 19th century romanticism and the alchemical concept of the Magnum Opus a search for transformation through working with the raw material of identity and experience.

He describes his figures as bending into existence, reflecting the possibilities for growth, transformation and the emergence of the integrated self. His work is not surrealism for its own sake. It is surrealism with a purpose and Parlay is a perfect example of exactly that.

Give him a follow and spend time with his full body of work his world is vast and entirely worth getting lost in.

02. Three Little Snakes by Olga Dugina @olgaduginartist

Second pick is this dreamy painting Three Little Snakes by Olga Dugina and the delicacy of it is what gets you first, before the strangeness kicks in. Three figures in white Victorian dresses move together in a quiet procession, their heads replaced by or perhaps transformed into elaborate arrangements of blue serpents, coiling and twisting above their shoulders like living crowns.

The whole piece is painted in watercolour, colour pencils and gouache with an extraordinary precision every scale on every snake, every ruffle of every dress, every detail immaculate and considered.

Olga Dugina is a Russian-born illustrator and artist based in Stuttgart, Germany, who together with her husband Andrej Dugin has built one of the most distinctive and celebrated bodies of work in contemporary illustration. Their collaborations have included illustrated editions of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, One Thousand and One Nights and numerous other classic texts each one produced with the same meticulous attention to detail and the same quietly surreal sensibility visible in this piece.

Go see everything she has been making once you start looking you will not stop.

03. Crying Cosmos by Angi G. @angig.art

Crying Cosmos by Angi G. lands at number three on our heart list this week , eyes on poles, stars in teardrops, and a grief so strange it becomes beautiful. Tall thin poles rise from a grassy field, each one topped with a large human eye some embedded in clouds, some standing alone against a dusky purple sky scattered with stars. The eyes are not watching you.

They are weeping, each one trailing a dark teardrop of something that looks like the cosmos itself pooling at their base. It is eerie and tender and quietly devastating all at once a landscape of grief made strange and beautiful through surrealist language.

Angi is a painter working in acrylic whose surrealist landscapes have a particular quality of turning the emotional interior into an exterior world where feelings become environments, where what is felt inside becomes the terrain you stand in.

Give her a follow and see everything she has been making her whole page carries this same unsettling yet beautiful quality.

04. As Above, So Below by Paxton Morgan @paxtonmorganart

Number four on our list this week goes to As Above, So Below by Paxton Morgan, surrealism that thinks, and thinks deeply. A figure kneels on a barren landscape, a massive rainbow arcing above, the moon visible in a dark sky, and below a perfect reflection in still water that shows the cosmos rather than the scene above. The ancient hermetic phrase the title borrows says it perfectly what exists above mirrors what exists below, and vice versa. But Paxton adds his own layer to it.

He describes transformation as something that connects everything subconsciously, Pluto as the planet of destruction for the sake of rebirth, the rainbow as the end and the beginning of something, the clouds as embodiments of human duality.

Paxton is an emerging painter whose whole practice is built around transformation, symbolism and the metaphysical exploring the relationship between the visible and the invisible, the conscious and the subconscious, destruction and rebirth. His body of work is consistent, compelling and growing fast.

Give him a follow and see everything he has been working on this is an artist right at the beginning of something significant.

05. Feline Kiss by Gerlanda di Francia @gerlandadifrancia

And rounding out our heart list this week is Feline Kiss by Gerlanda di Francia andthe closer you look the more you find. Within an octagonal frame surrounded by lush painted foliage, a hand reaches down toward a tangle of creature’s feline, reptilian, something in between, all painted in deep greens and earthy ochres with a precision that makes the whole scene feel both intimate and unsettling.

Gerlanda is an Italian artist associated with the Italian Surrealist Pop movement, who works in oil and acrylic with the conviction that classical technique is what makes the improbable feel convincing. Her practice is rooted in fairy tales not the sweetened, sanitised versions, but the original ones, dark and ambivalent, full of ogres and chaos and the irruption of instinct into daily life.

She believes in both the destructive and constructive power of those stories that a knight only becomes a hero by facing the dragon and her paintings force us to confront the dragon hidden within ourselves.

Give her a follow and see everything she has been making, her world is unlike anything else out there.

That is our heart list for this week, five surrealist works that proved once again that the strange, when handled with real intention, gets closer to the truth than anything straightforward ever could.

Follow them, share their work, leave a comment that actually means something. They made something worth stopping for and they deserve to know it landed.

One more thing. After a week spent looking at paintings full of faces, eyes, figures and the psychology hiding behind them the 101 Art Book: Faces Edition by Arts to Hearts Project could not feel more fitting. This is the 14th edition in the celebrated 101 Art Book series a globally distributed hardcover publication bringing together 101 artists to explore identity, emotion and expression through the human face. Open to all mediums, all artists, all backgrounds worldwide. 101 spots. Go submit your work.