Get Inspired by Baziotes

William Baziotes was profoundly affected by his encounters with Surrealists who were living in New York City in the 1940s. The Surrealists were, in part, inspired by dreams and fantasy from the unconscious mind, linking them with symbols and free association as ways to convey these ideas in their art and writing. Baziotes incorporated the Surrealist practice of automatism—drawing without conscious intent using biomorphic imagery.

Desert Animal is part of a small group of single-image paintings Baziotes created containing amoeba-like and organic shapes. The greenish figure floating freely on the purplish background has a hallucinatory, vaporous quality. During this time, poetry became integral to his art, and he was inspired by the writings of Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe among others.