The term Pareidolia refers to the human tendency or phenomenon to perceive patterns, objects, or meaning in places that typically would not have them. An example would be seeing shapes in clouds or seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns. While some people attribute this phenomenon to them receiving spiritual signs or being sent personal messages from an unknown sender, I embrace the random beauty and complexities of the world and how our brains perceive them. Using pareidolia as an artistic device, my goal was to show a visual process of evolving naturally occurring or everyday images from life into surrealist paintings and drawings. The images stemmed from photographs I took and automatism experiments such as dropping ink onto paper and seeing what forms could be identified from that.

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I have always been drawn to the surreal approach to making artwork; the use of automatism, distortions of reality, logic defying juxtapositions, and most importantly the freedom to filter the world around you in a subjective and personally unique way. During this process I found inspiration from artists such as Max Ernst and Oscar Domínguez through their way of creating forms, selection of colors, and automatism techniques.

 

The first step in my three-step process involved photographing an area of interest that held suggestable organic forms that I could turn into realized subjects. For the next step I printed a copy of the photograph and began to paint or draw over the photo to identify forms I had perceived. On the final step I took the outlines of step two and painted them onto a new surface. During the transition from outline to painting I took creative liberties in changing position and scale of the outlined subjects while crafting the new composition. On top of the three-step process I also included works made through automatism techniques. The different sets of works show the process of finding pareidolic images naturally vs creating the effect myself. In the works where I used automatism, I used ink and water to create random forms; I then drew and painted over the forms that I identified out of the random occurrence. Throughout the process of making these works I now see pareidolic patterns and forms more frequently than ever before.