Stephanie Tihanyi-Artist

Artists Statement

Although not every painting I make is surrealst, I consider my-self a surrealist painter. When I am asked why I paint the things I do I reply, I do it to understand reality. This is a contradiction, painting unreality to better understand reality?.

I will try to explain. To make sense of the world all humans by degree, strive to express the truths of past and present experiences. I explore these truths by way of the subconcious. Why the subconcious?, because that is where we experience things at the deepest level. In the course of surviving lifes painful adversities we often submerge our truths beneath the concious level in order to get through the day. Once there, it stays there until at an appropriate time these truths arise in the form of dreams, reveries, feelings and works of art. Consider some words of wisdom from- Jesus, the Gospel according to Thomas,"if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth, will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth, will destroy you".

Our inner worlds hold a rich knowledge, that when liberated can lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves, others and our enviroment.

With surrealism, I can make the unseen and hidden, manifest. Contradictory ideas can exist together in harmony, in the same time and space. Painting in a style that is ultra-realistic, things that are clearly hallucinary and unreal. The language of the inner world is emotional, uncanny, visionary, chimerial, dreamlike, idealistic and naturally subversive when it confronts our dominant waking conciousness. While I work, I employ the full use of imaginative and medative states, dreams and 'casual' perceptive distortions in something I call 'poetic thinking'. Another devise used, that was used by early surrealists and even earlier by Leonardo da Vinci, who described the laying of white silk upon a rock in order to percive in the creases and folds, "all manner of fantastic beasts and imaginary landscapes". One can also think of the phenomenon of seeing shapes in clouds or figures in the fire. In earlier times these things where seen as methods of divination and healing. Salvidore Dali drew on these techniques to access subconcious knowledge in his 'paranoiac critical method". In contempory psychology, Dr Stanislav Grof, the founder of 'trans-personnal psychology' calls this 'holiotropic thinking' (from the Greek- moving towards wholeness).

My current work is a continuing development of my past work which portrays inner realities filled with dramatic narrations, poputated with symbolism, archetypes, mandalas, spritual ideals,demonic and angelic alter-egos. There I try to balance contradictory concepts such as good and evil, life and death, love and hate, objective and subjective experience, the real and illusionary. I juggle emotional juxtapositions like, ecstasy and dispair, tenderness and cruelty, fear and fasination, the familliar and the uncanny.

I extend this into my work using strong contrasts of light and shade, vivid and dramatic oppositional colours, my favorite combination being vermillion red and colbalt blue, the yin and yang of the colour palatte. For my future work I still have a lot to uncover, delving into subjects such as joy, spirituality, sensuality and the erotic. It is my belife that these inner worlds exist in all human beings and are as real as the real world in so much as they can change us. Without the rich inner life all is just empty matter, devoid of meaning and purpose or growth, and then on the other hand, without being fully engaged in our external world, we starve our subjective life of the oxegen of experience and it stagnates. Its a matter of maintaining the balance bettween opposites and tolerating ambiguity. I have come to believe there are no absolutes.

 In thinking about reality, I meditate upon these words, (Creator), Jesus, the Gospel according to Thomas, " if those who lead you say, 'look! the Kingdom of God is in the sky', the birds will get there first. If they say to you, 'it is in the Ocean!', the fishes will get there first. But the Kingdom of God,  (a state of conciousness)  is within you and outside you. Once you come to know yourselves, you will become known, and you will know it is you who are the children of the living Creator".

Similar are also the words of Morehei Ushiba, founder of Aikido martial arts, who's Shinto belifes are reveled in this quote, "the Divine is not something high above us, it is in Heaven, it is in the Earth, it is in us.  Each one of us is a minature universe, a living shrine. When you bow deeply to the Universe, it bows back, when you call out the name of God, it echoes inside of you".