I've always been interested in surrealism. Actually, I think it was surrealism that got me into art in the first place. It was in photography that I did a project on night photography, and almost all of them were surrealists. I studied Bill Brandt and Man Ray, and from that point on, I think all of my work has been influenced by them. So surrealism has been a strong point in my art since Photo 1.

This was my first strictly surreal project that I've done. All of my night photos I think can be considered surrealistic, but I've never taken them with the intent of them being surreal. It's just something that I started to notice, and I think that's better than trying to achieve surrealism, since it's more of an extension of my own ideas. My ideas just are surreal.

But back to my image. It took a long time for me to figure out what I wanted to do. I looked through all the books I had; a book on surrealism, a Man Ray photo collection, a Dali collection, a Bill Brandt collection. But it was finally in my book on Japanese Photography of the last century that I saw the image that inspired it all. It was a very grainy photo of a man on the horizon line, on top of a snowy hill, while it was snowing. I thought it was awesome, so I thought of what I could do wit ha scene like that.

My next idea came from a School of the Art Institute of Chicago information booklet. There were many picture of art being deconstructed, so I wanted to try that with one of my pictures. Sadly, the photo I used doesn't have much unity to it, but it fit in with the background and overall colors.

Probably like 5 years ago, I saw Garbage's music video for the song "Push It", and in it, there were men made of static snow that you see on the televison. This stuck with me, and I used it.

Overall, this turned out nicely. It seems minimal, and I like it like that. Something I had a hard time with was the proportions, but since it is surreal, the proportions don't matter as much. However, it does take away from the realism, which was very important in the most famous surrealists artworks (Dali, Magritte).