Featured Artist - Daniel C. Boyer

Vol 3 Issue 2 of Snow Monkey featured the work of Daniel C. Boyer, Michigan surrealist. In addition to our attraction to his artwork, the editors appreciate the poetry and humor of the titles he gives to his pieces. Daniel's comments appear below--more information about Daniel and his art is available at www.fimp.net/medanboyer1.html

I have been active in surrealism since 1992, although my earliest automatic drawings and paintings date to my discovery of the Manifestoes of Surrealism by André Breton in the summer of 1987. In addition to painting in gouache and using fumage, I produce drawings using an automatic method developed by surrealists in Bucharest in which a dot is made at the site of impurities in a blank piece of paper, and lines are then drawn between the dots. The pieces in Snow Monkey were done using that method. I am currently working on a book discussing this method and its place within the plastic arts.

I also work with prehensilhouettes, a method invented by Penelope Rosemont, and have experimented with work involving computer graphics and mushrooms. My credits include solo exhibits in Marquette, Michigan and New York, and Montreal, in addition to participation in numerous group shows.

(Regarding the last drawing): These are characters in "Hangul," the Korean alphabet (see below for how to make one of these characters-one makes a sound similar to the "h" in English.) Hangul is an alphabet but it is also a syllabary, as the "letters" are stacked in blocks, each block representing one syllable. There is a particular pattern in which the letters must be arranged in the block: typically, there are three; two on top and one on the bottom. The letter on the upper left must be a consonant, that on the upper right, a vowel. The letter on the bottom makes a consonant sound. When King Sejong invented Hangul in 1443, as a simplified form of writing that all the people could understand (Korean previously having been written with modified Chinese characters), it was very different from Hangul today, and somewhat more complicated. In the intervening period, 'scholars' have gradually stripped away many of the difficult aspects, and with it much of the beauty. The example in my drawing is a sort of double h, extremely difficult to pronounce, which existed in the Middle Ages but no more. I had an emotional response to the systematic destruction of much of Korean. There has been a similar trend in English, perhaps not as pronounced, toward simplification which has led not toward greater understanding as much as toward an increasing poverty of expression.