High school Surrealism

Many years ago, when I began to teach at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, I noticed that the portfolios of high school seniors (almost always males) heading to the Academy were filled with drawings of skulls, knives dripping blood, burning candles, all in curious spatial settings. I called this "high school Surrealism," and felt it was my task in drawing to move them along to wider skills and more sophisticated subject matter. It seemed to me that most male teenagers moved into their adolescent male cave and that this approach to their art emerged there.

Decades later, I began to realize that high school Surrealism had morphed into a gender-neutral, comic book, superhero, anime, zine culture that was not transient and that often maintained itself through their college experience and into their professional lives.

It seemed necessary that my task had to change, that I needed to help them avoid being trapped by style and to consider the content of their work. I no longer really lived in their world, but still wondered about it. Why did the apparent adolescence of their images sustain itself?  Where did the fascination with monsters come from? Why did this imaginary and cartoonish world have such appeal over reality? It was clear why superheroes were super; but did they understand what it meant to be heroes?

I don't have any answers to these questions other than my own, and I'm not even sure if it's fair of me to ask the questions.