OXYMORON DRAWING
Magritte, Rene. The Empire of Lights , 1954.
Oxymoron Drawing
After using images to compliment one
another to make a statement in your
Metaphoric Drawing, you will now use
images that contradict one another to make
an artistic statement.
OXYMORON: DEFINED
A figure of speech in
which contradictory
terms are combined, as in
a deafening silence
OXYMORON: examples
A Fine Mess
Dry Ice
Big Sip
Old News
Young Adult
Fail Safe
Cold Sweat
Barely Dressed
Almost Done
Civil War
Assignment:
1.! Create a visual oxymoron. Take an
ordinary object and do something to it
to make it “self-contradictory” and
preposterous. Your drawing will be
combine images to create a scene
that would not occur “in real life.”
René Magritte
Born in Lessines, Belgium, on
November 21, 1898, Magritte was the
eldest of three brothers born to a
minor Belgian industrialist. In 1912 his
mother drowned herself and shortly
thereafter, seeking to escape the
rather dismal remnants of family life,
Magritte turned to art. In 1927 he
began a three-year sojourn in Paris
but returned to Brussels where he had
taken up residence and where, for the
most part, he remained for the rest of
his life. He was sixty-eight when he
died on August 15, 1967, and in the
course of his life he had developed a
vast oeuvre devoted to the purest
tenets of surrealism.
Source: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin
René Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte,
the “Master of the Art of
Resemblance,” has long been
accepted as one of the leading
masters of Surrealism. He begins
with a premise of realism but seeks
to confound us with deliberate
contradiction in terms. He mixes
relative reality (or what we think to
be true) with absolute reality (or
what we know to be true) and in the
end causes us to reappraise our
own view of a world grown too
familiar.
Source: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin
Magritte, Rene. Son of Man, 1964
Magritte, Rene. The Red Model, 1934.
Magritte, Rene. The Empire of Light, 1954.
Magritte, Rene. The Empire of Light II, 1950.
Magritte, Rene. Almayer’s Folly, 1968.
Magritte, Rene. The False Mirror, 1928.
Magritte, Rene. Not to be Reproduced, 1937.
Additional examples of a visual
oxymoron
Assignment:
2.! The merger of two or more
contradictory images must include
one as observational drawing and the
other from memory or fantasy.
Assignment:
3. Begin with several pencil sketches
before beginning final artwork.
Assignment:
3.! Rendering must be done in two or
more drawing media and in of four
techniques (pointillism, hatching,
cross hatch, chiaroscuro).