Sometime in the thirties, I can’t quite remember when, I began to see some very small black and white reproductions of the first surrealist shows in Europe; they just began to trickle out in magazines and articles, and a friend in London sent out something about it, a catalogue with some photographs, and from that moment on I knew this was the sort of art that really fascinated me, something that opened up a world of the imagination and got away from the sort of surface realities of life, which even at that stage I felt to be only a superficial part of life. With this new vision of what reality could mean, I began to become really seriously interested in art.
That was my first real understanding of the significance of art as a way of coming to grips with life, of understanding life; and that I think is the essential meaning of art. I don’t feel it’s a way of decorating a room, certainly not for an artist at any rate, it’s a way of coming to grips with reality, a way of getting to know what you yourself are like or what the world around you is like. And it seemed to me that surrealism, as a theory at any rate, offered enormous scope, and I felt that with the Surrealists, that the world of seeming – of things as they seem to be – was not the true world at all; that in the subconscious mind there were all sorts of images, ideas which were a part of reality, and, as a painter, I tried to express this subconscious material, or some of the images from it, at any rate.
