I had this thought during the exhibition visit of surrealist artist Leonara Carrington. Grew up in England from a textile family with an irish mother and three brothers, she had an eventful life before even reaching the age of 30. Frequently moved around (In Paris, Florenze, Madrid, South of France in her youth…) meeting her then-lover-mentor Ernst and living through the WWII, fleeding to Spain where she was raped by soldiers finally resulted her being sent to psychological institution by her parent before escaping Europe and finally moving to Mexico where she spent a good part of the rest of her life.
No doubt the stressful life event and trauma would have caused her some psychological disturbances. But I noticed that she had shown a vivid picturestic imagination since early age. Her doodle book at the age of 10 was filled with fairytale monsters and mysterious creatures in stranger lands. Her watercolour paintings at the age of 15 showed a mixture of fictional characters that are human-like humanroids clearly distinguishable from “us”. One can certainly argue that she was heavily inspired by the likes of folklores, myths, tarot cards, religious stories, but to have these images and being able to reproduce them brings me the question of - whether or not she saw them in her head? Does this sound familiar to common symptoms of schizophrenia, notability, hallucinations?
Stretching far into my personal experience, the inspirational source of my own artworks are almost always coming from a ‘database’ of imageries pre-stored in my brain. They are randomly appearing like a projection into the ‘frontal’ part of my head as inspirations come. Drawing on a blank piece of paper is almost similar to the experience of tracing a shape or object or creature from an existing projection.
Le Bon Roi Dagobert (Elk Horn), 1948 © 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / ADAGP, Paris