The human psyche is a complex and multifaceted mystery.
It is still largely an uncharted area fraught with contradicting
theories and speculations, ever since Sigmund Freud
published his controversial studies of the subconscious.

Successive psychiatric theorists have postulated that the
psyche is a place of conflict between a conscious and an
unconscious mind, and within the confines of these two
separate and distinct worlds, certain mechanisms have
developed to cope with the vital aspects of our emotional
divergence and deal with our other  multifarious cognitive
processes, such as consciousness, perception, memory and dreams.

Soon after the WWI, a new movement of disillusioned artists
sprouted in Europe,  having lost all faith in humanity’s ability to
resolve it’s differences without horrific warring; they presented this in their artwork, to a fractured society that they believed; it doesn’t deserve art or beauty but nihilism,  anti-art and ugliness.
They named themselves DADA!
 
Out of the ashes of this short- lived movement, surrealism
was  borne. With some shared aspects of DADA, but with a
better outlook and more emphasis on the “inner-self”, dreams, mythology  and the subconscious, they aimed to reinterpret reality and reconcile  the apparent anomaly in our visual experience and how it no longer  corresponded with the new scientific view of the world.

They set out, also, to gain access to these private regions of
feelings and thoughts through dream-imagery, and random
association of words. They were seeking new ways of accessing the subconscious mind and new ways to represent it in their art, and to combine that gained knowledge with the conscious reality to produce a new type of higher reality, a hyper-reality, if you like, or sur-reality, hence the name of their movement.

Our Australian artist in review, Lee Anne Raymond, is very much a modern product of this tradition; this is very evident right through her haunting and often hypnotic work. Unlike many of today’s self-proclaimed surrealists, who espouse the genre just to mask their inability and loss of artistic vision, Lee Anne displays a highly matured style of painting combined with her clear and consistent visual execution of ideas to produce such realistic images of her bizarre and fantastic worlds.

Lee Anne writes “I cannot simply paint what is there and attain satisfaction from the effort. It is not enough”, exactly what the surrealist artists have discovered in the limitations of painting just what is in the natural world, and I can see that she has  succeeded in taking this premise further by using the objects and figures appearing in her paintings as metaphors and symbols to a much deeper level of consciousness and communicating the intended ideas directly through the medium as a secret language of the secretive world of the psyche.  

She also writes attempting to clarify some of the motives that
spur her to paint; she says, “I hope to provoke questions for the viewer to ponder, with each image  I want them to think; what does this image mean?”... an intelligent and intellectual way to engage the viewer in analysing a painting and getting much more than the obvious…this is what a successful artwork supposed to impart! 

Lee Anne also raises an important and very valid point in regard of surreal and fantastic art in Australia, she also writes: “The genre is generally dismissed, what is accepted and promoted, is art which defines the psyche of the nation. The auction houses and even the art museums here are dominated by bush-scapes, bushrangers and "folklorique” genre paintings!”

This really is the status quo of not just Australia, but the whole global art scene as well, for art gurus seem to have moved on, defining new art schools and promoting them as the avant-garde “thing” and all should follow, bypassing or deliberately ignoring the fact that artists of the surreal, among others, are still here growing and evolving in the most mind challenging ways.
It is a pity, for as she puts it, “Art of the imagination knows no borders or boundaries designated by fashion, fad or parochialism.”…
How true!

 Among the many paintings featured on Lee Anne’s website, there is a series named the “Mysteries”, this is as she describes it, based on a personal fascination with Ancient Greek and Roman Myth, that has proved to be an
excellent source of inspiration to her, and that is probably why I found these paintings to be quite enigmatic and intriguing and I am sure they will appeal to all of you out there who love this mystifying kind of painting.

On a technical note, the website is well structured with easy navigation and contains no dead links. The pictures displayed are reasonably sized for quick downloading and there was no other problems encountered. The “links page” contains a large number of surreal artists sites and web-rings, which is an added bonus as well. 

All in all, a fascinating site, well worth your visit, I’ll be visiting back for sure!

Visit Lee Anne Raymond’s website at:

http://www.netspace.net.au/~leeanne/directory.html