Dasha Pears about her art, style, and psychorealism:
answering popular questions
Psychorealism: the reality of what’s going on in people’s psyche, their very real but invisible inner world.
The focus of psychorealism is on human psychology. Psychorealistic photographs celebrate myriad psychological states and phenomena sometimes deemed unsightly, capturing their beauty and inherent transcience. Human emotions and feelings are wrapped in delightfully minimalistic, aesthetically striking, and thought-provoking visual narratives in hope and an attempt to help the artist as well as the viewers process them easier and accept that, which sometimes can be difficult and unpleasant.
Remove the noise. See clearly.
Why clean and minimal? Because there’s too much clutter, garbage, and noise in the world around you. Just look around. It’s a mess. You can’t see what’s at the bottom if the water is dirty. You can’t see, act or feel clearly when there’s too much going on. Do you actually savor the taste of your favorite ice cream while watching a movie or in the middle of a lively conversation?
Rhythm and repetitions: any rhythm is sort of predictable, it gives you confidence and calms you down. When you find a pattern, your mind doesn’t have to work as hard and you find relaxation. At least for a little while.
Few Colors: It actually helps you focus. And relax as well. You can concentrate on just a limited number of emotions and ideas that I try to encourage you to find within yourself when you’re looking at my art. This way you can go all in.
It’s all Photoshop. Edited reality is just so much better.
Photoshop: It’s all photoshop. And a big part of it is not. My art is not pure photography and never attempted to be. This is beside the point. My camera and software give me the tools to create new worlds for viewers to explore and admire. Does it actually matter how those worlds are created? If it does than I invite you to pay attention to dozens, if not hundreds of incredibly skilled photographers out there who put all the effort into the pre-production. I’m not one of them and never will be.
Edited Reality Let’s face it. Edited reality is just so much better. Numerous authors, psychologists, and philosophers noted that as human beings we are just not happy with what we have. We want to get more. Or less. We want something different from what we have now. I’ve come to the point when I want to accept and embrace this fact.
The edited reality is way cooler than the real one. I own it now. I don’t want to hide that I edit my nature, I will just edit it proudly and loudly from now on. I don’t want my images to look realistic anymore like I did before. Cause they are not. If you want beautiful landscapes, there’re thousands of amazing landscape photographers out there. If you want detailed polished faces - again, there’re arguably millions shooting them. I am just not among them and it feels so good.
Surprise is what matters the most
Why surreal? There’s a quote that goes: “One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” It means that new thoughts, new ideas, and perspectives permanently change our the way we see the world. Our thought process becomes different, once we have a new idea with which to play. So I like finding those new ideas, playing with them, and surprising myself along the way. For my work to be successful it has to be surprising. If it’s not, I don’t really like it, I feel like it’s missing something. There are millions of people taking beautiful photos, I don’t want to be one of them, I want my works to catch your eye, and attention and make you wonder: what? why? how? I want to move your horizons of possible so that you go on to the new spaces in which your mind can play.
Symbols help you make the picture you see your own, and add something of your personality, background, or views. So it stops being just mine. There’s no point in creating just for yourself.
A human figure is important. It connects everything to reality. Helps make the surreal worlds around tangible. Model faces almost don’t matter now. They did matter a lot when I just started, but now I can see almost anyone in my created world. But it won’t be a portrait depicting a real person, say Ann Smith, with all her stories and troubles, and loves, and sorrows, it will be rather a collective universal image of a human that any of us can be (of associate ourselves with) at any moment in life. Because life is random.
Why birds? They are free and wise. They react to change but have an internal compass. They are symbolic and can be interpreted in dozens of ways by different viewers, so their presence adds meaning to my work and that meaning will be unique to you.
To me birds are also symbolic expressions of our soul (for lack of a better word), they to me personify the internal observer that notices all the calamities going on in your head, seeing them for what they are without judgment, and helping you to let go.
Circles or spheres are a representation of universality for me. They are comforting, cozy and make me think of home. Not in a sense of some building in some city, but rather some feeling or atmosphere of a warm embrace that keeps you safe and calm in any place no matter what. It can be a bubble, or a rabbit hole, or a womb, or a nest. It’s just nice to know that you can always have it and even be that for someone else.
I just want to share a bit of my weirdness with the world
Captions: Stories, the short captions that I try to add to every work, are not explanations, rather they invite you to step deeper into the mystery of the unknown and entertain yourself with new thoughts on either familiar or unfamiliar topic. Everyone says that they want to know the secret behind the trick, but in reality knowing the secret destroys the magic, being in the dark about something and not knowing everything is what keeps us going.
What are you trying to say? In fact, I don’t want to say anything with my art, I just want to share a bit of my weirdness with the world. I’m happy if you resonate with it. It’s always amazing to feel connected to others through some kind of weirdness, isn’t it?
