Surrealist Still Life: Painting the Impossible

This four-session course invites students to reimagine the traditional still life through the lens of Surrealism. Students will explore classical vanitas and memento mori traditions alongside Surrealist approaches such as melting objects, long shadows, distortion, and the uncanny.

The course blends technical foundations in drawing and painting with creative exercises from the Surrealist tradition, automatic drawing, Exquisite Corpse, and imaginative transformation, to unlock the unconscious and expand creative thinking.

During the first half of the course, students will explore Surrealist motifs and visual language.
In the second half, they will develop a personal surrealist still-life painting that merges realism, symbolism, and dream logic.

Class Breakdown

Class 1: The Language of Surrealism

• Lecture: Introduction to Surrealism and its key motifs; dreams, the uncanny transformation.
• Discussion: Classical still-life traditions (vanitas, memento mori, allegory of the senses).
• Creative Exercise: Automatic drawing and Exquisite Corpsewarm-ups to unleash imagination.
• Studio Practice: Sketch still-life objects from observation.
• Writing Prompt: “Describe an ordinary object as if you’ve never seen it before.”

Class 2: Unlocking the Unconscious

• Short lecture: Surrealist composition and imagination (Dalí, Magritte, Carrington, Kahlo).
• Warm-Up: Transform a common object into something uncanny.
• Studio Practice: Combine realism with distortion or unexpected context.
• Collaborative Activity: Exquisite Corpse II – The Dream Table.
• Focus: Composition, proportion, and shadow.

Class 3: From Observation to Transformation

• Mini lecture: The logic of illusion (Magritte’s The Human Conditionand Empire of Light).
• Studio Work: Begin final surrealist still-life painting.
• Integrate classical motifs with imaginative or dreamlike transformations.
• Instructor feedback on light, atmosphere, and spatial harmony.
• Focus: Color relationships and layering.
• Writing Prompt: “Describe your still life as a dream unfolding.”

Class 4: The Uncanny Arrangement

• Studio Work: Refine final surrealist still-life painting.
• Collaborative Activity: Exquisite Corpse III – Collective Vanitas, a group collage on time and transformation.
• Critique & Reflection: “What truth or emotion does your painting conceal?”
• Group critique and documentation.

 ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

José Delgado Zúñiga was born in Ventura, CA, in 1988 and moved to Miami in 2021. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been awarded the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, the Rema Hort Mann Artist Community Engagement Grant, and the Robert Gamblin Fellowship. He worked as an Adjunct Faculty member at Columbia University School of the Arts in New York City from 2017 to 2021 and served as the Lead Teaching Artist and Muralist at Groundswell in Brooklyn, NY, from 2017 to 2020.

His work is included in the collections the Marquez Art Projects Foundation, Miami, the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, and The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, among other prominent collections.

Delgado Zuñiga has exhibited his work in group and solo exhibitions at the Marquez Art Projects Foundation, the Yale Divinity School of Sacred Music, New Haven, CT; Museum of Ventura County, Ventura, CA; Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA; and in Bronx Calling: The 5th AIM Bronx Biennial, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Figure Fire Fantasy, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Miami, FL; The Frost Art Museum, Florida, CENTRAL SOUNDS at Luhring Augustine Gallery, Chelsea, CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, FL; among others.