Week one - Research Evaluation.. what am I thinking and why?

I have spent the week doing research on the artist 'René Magritte' who has inspired me to experiment with surreal photography.

the beginning of my thought process started as I was drawn to his paining, 'the Great War,' as it made me question what his reasoning was for placing something clearly over the woman's face. What was it representing? What was the significance of the flowers over the woman's face? I thought about how he was challenging ideas of beauty standards and perfection. I then noticed how the background of the image was also what could be described as 'perfect weather', making me believe more that he was possibly trying to portray a 'perfect image'. This lead me to look at different types of surrealism photography, mixing the real world with a fantasy like world, giving the impression that the world itself is not as beautiful as we can make it out to be in our heads or our imagination.

I thought about the same concept but with people, leading me to, just like René Magritte, think about portraits with flowers covering the face, as nature is known to be beautiful, maybe more so than humans. Also, I thought about how this surrealism style could be used to portray the stress on standards for women to fulfil, by placing something over the face which might be stereotypically 'prettier' then the woman herself.

From the research that I have done, and the Pinterest rabbit hole that I fell down looking at different examples of surreal photoshop edits, I have decided that I would like to attempt to create my own surreal art. I am going to create two separate images, one focusing on portrait, being a simple photograph of a person to bring attention to the flowers I want to place over their face, and the second being a landscape edit, preferably of city buildings, and edit the sky to create a surreal world, mixing reality with surrealism.

I am excited to experiment with something new as I do not usually focus my work on photography, as I would describe myself more as a film maker. I am nervous that I will not be able to produce what I want to, but I will try my hardest and hope for the best!