Henry Derger - The realms of the unreal

One of the main points of my work is that I want it to reflect my own true nature and my own ideas. I want it to look like mine and mine alone. I have to have a connection with the topic and show deeper understanding of what it is I'm trying to portray. Surrealism is a big part of the way I work and I want to show something along those lines. Im not just going to draw something weird and random and say look thats surrealist. It has to connect and be a true representation. 

I came across an artist called Henry Derger and instantly fell in love with his style of work and imaginative drawings. Im became slightly obsessed with wanting to leaner more about his working methods and his bizarre yet almost truthful long book "In the realms of the unreal". You get a real sense of loneliness and isolation from his own life, working in total obscurity and isolation - no one even found out about his book until years after he died. He used his drawings and writing to reflect on his own conflicts and dysfunctional life. He lived a very troubled childhood and this book of his reflects on that. 

What got me the most though was the beautiful drawings and dream like way of working. They really represent what he was thinking and are ver clever  in the way the talk to you and communicate with you. With his own marginal status he creates a book where children rise up against the oppressive adults- who look down upon the "feeble minded". The manipulation of images and overlay of collage and colour are really something to be admired and a way of working I want to try and explore in this project. 

He had his own personal connection to his drawings and story. The theme of loneliness is one that keeps coming up everywhere I look and the connection to homelessness and nothingness been intertwined throughout my research. 

Darger had created a totally specific world, titled 'The Realms of the Unreal', that told the story of the Vivian girls, and their adventures during many Christian-led wars, the Glandeco-Angelinnian War, caused by the child slave rebellion. The paintings, constructed with various mediums and methods, illustrated this fantasy world, using collage, ink and paint, and he collected images, xeroxing many particular images over and over, to portray his beloved Vivian girls. With no exterior life, and a lack of social skills, Darger had lived completely within this inner world, where he kept intricate details and charts detailing the events in the "realm", and documented the wars - including names, dates of soldiers deaths, the costs of each of these wars: immensely detailed, impeccably assembled.