Why Folk Memory Keeps Entering My Surreal Drawings
My surreal drawings often grow from folk memory rather than from conscious storytelling. I don’t approach folklore as a fixed tradition or a set of symbols to quote. I experience it as an emotional undercurrent, something absorbed long before it becomes language. Folk roots surface in my work because they already live inside the body, in gestures, repetitions, and instincts. Surreal form becomes a way to let those inherited patterns rise without turning them into illustration.
Folk Roots as Emotional Structure, Not Decoration
When folk elements appear in my drawings, they are not ornamental. They function as structure. Traditional motifs, mirrored growth, ritual symmetry, plant bodies, and hybrid figures all come from visual systems designed to hold meaning, protection, and continuity. I’m interested in how these systems translate into contemporary emotional experience. Folk logic provides a container. Surreal distortion allows that container to adapt to present-day feeling.
Why Surreal Form Fits Ancestral Material
Surreal drawing is often associated with dreams or the subconscious, but it also aligns naturally with folk imagination. Pre-modern visual culture rarely separated the real from the symbolic. Spirits, plants, bodies, and landscapes flowed into one another. Surreal form allows me to work in that same fluid space, where transformation feels normal rather than dramatic. The drawing doesn’t ask what something is. It asks how it behaves emotionally.
Contemporary Emotion Inside Ancient Shapes
While the visual language of my drawings may feel old, the emotions they carry are distinctly contemporary. Anxiety, fragmentation, sensitivity, longing for belonging, and the desire for inner coherence all enter through these forms. Folk-rooted imagery gives these emotions a place to settle. Surreal transformation allows them to remain unresolved. The drawing becomes a meeting point between inherited structure and present tension.
The Body as a Site of Folk and Surreal Convergence
In many of my drawings, the body becomes the primary space where folk and surreal elements merge. Faces split or repeat. Limbs turn into branches. Organs resemble seeds or flowers. This is not meant to shock. It reflects how emotional experience is embodied. Folk traditions understood the body as symbolic terrain. Surreal drawing allows me to continue that understanding without fixing it into doctrine.
Symbol Without Explanation
I avoid explaining symbols in my work because folk imagery never operated through instruction. It functioned through recognition. A repeated sign meant something because it had been felt before. In my drawings, symbols are allowed to remain ambiguous. Their meaning unfolds through emotional response rather than decoding. This ambiguity keeps the work alive and relational rather than closed.
Why Folk Elements Still Feel Relevant
Folk-rooted imagery persists because it speaks to continuity. In moments of instability, people return to visual languages that promise coherence without control. My drawings don’t recreate folk art. They carry its emotional logic into a contemporary context where certainty is rare. Surreal distortion reflects that uncertainty while folk structure provides grounding.
Colour as Emotional Bridge Between Eras
Colour plays a crucial role in connecting ancestral imagery with contemporary feeling. Traditional folk palettes were often symbolic rather than realistic. I use colour in a similar way, not to describe the world but to describe internal states. Saturation, contrast, and glow allow emotion to move freely across time. Colour becomes the bridge between old forms and current experience.
Surreal Drawing as Emotional Translation
I think of surreal drawing as translation rather than invention. It translates sensations that don’t yet have language. Folk roots give that translation a grammar. Contemporary emotion provides the content. The drawing exists somewhere between memory and immediacy, between what was carried and what is being felt now.
Why These Drawings Feel Familiar and Strange
People often describe my work as familiar and strange at the same time. This tension comes from the meeting of folk recognition and surreal disruption. Something in the image feels known, while something else resists naming. This balance mirrors emotional experience itself, especially in a world where identity and belonging are constantly shifting.
Continuity Without Nostalgia
I’m not interested in nostalgia. I’m interested in continuity. Folk-rooted surreal drawings allow me to work with inherited visual intelligence without idealising the past. The drawings acknowledge lineage while remaining responsive to the present. They don’t look backward for comfort. They look inward for orientation.
When Drawing Becomes a Shared Language
Ultimately, surreal drawings with folk roots function as a shared emotional language. They don’t belong to one culture, one story, or one time. They operate through resonance. By allowing ancestral structures and contemporary emotion to coexist, the drawing becomes a space where personal feeling meets collective memory, quietly and without explanation.
