As best I can figure, Austin Osman Spare [30 December 1886 - 15 May 1956] was the first

Surrealist. The word didn't really exist when he was starting out, but he was already doing

work that dealt with the same subjects in a similar way. I don't think he gets grouped

with them because he was and is too weird. He started out going to the Royal College

of Art, and his dad submitted a couple of his early works to the Royal Academy Summer

Show, which gave him some early notoriety. At a young age, he met a witch who introduced

him to a personal style of magic, which he developed into Chaos Magic, wherein a practitioner

writes a statement of intent, converts it into a sigil or image, meditates until the

mind silences, then destroys the sigil, forgetting it afterwards.

His most developed images are his Sidereal Portraits. He would take printed images of

celebrities, look at them at an angle, then paint them on this angle. The effect is as

if they were pulled and distorted, yet retain the dimensionality he was able to create with

his academic background. During World War I, he was assigned to draw

images of the battlefields. Having survived that, he came back to the UK, where he lived

a modest to poor existence, keeping open house in his flat and selling drawings for as little

as 2GBP. He published a text called Automatic Drawing

in 1916, but was doing automatic drawings as early as 1900. The technique was either

picked up or discovered independently by the Surrealists a bit later. Andre Breton published

The First Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, where he mentions automatic writing. The idea

of the technique is to turn off one's conscious mind, allowing the hand to draw freely without

influence. As the marks are made, certain images appear and are then developed into

more polished images or figures. Spare wrote of waking up at nights with his hand moving

over his sketchbook, drawing while asleep, perhaps for hours.

AOS certainly deserves some attention, particularly if you're interested in the Occult, Surrealism,

or Experimental music. He's been an influence on artists such as Throbbing Gristle, Coil,

Psychic TV, Val Denham, and Genesis P. Orridge. My name is Mead McLean, and this has been

3 Minute Art History.