Dan Mountford - Contemporary Surrealist Designer

This is one artwork from a series done by Dan Mountford called ‘the world inside us’. Mountford is a 20 year old freelance graphic designer based in Brighton England. The artist here creates a magnificent pictorial artwork done with his famous technique; double exposure photography as after he edits his photos in Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. The artist himself describes his work as ‘a visual journey through our minds by calm and tidy means which the reality of everyday life does not show’.

As one can see in this stunning work of art, Dan captures different shots of things that surrounds us just like nature (plants, animals and insects), landscapes, buildings, human forms /portraits which allows him to combine two or more different themes into one subject. Impressive much, the artist himself manages to create the shots exposures by camera only and not a single touch in an editing programme. Dan’s techniques are simply shown off as he decided to make use of black and grey instead of using colours where lights and shadows still makes a lot of sense in his images that creates a whole artwork.
This particular artwork shows a delicate composition of a sensitive and mysterious feel caused by the artist himself as one can’t really tell what the lines connected to each other which form the face really mean, yet his style which is based on Surrealism is all about.

In my own opinion I think that the artist is trying to make a statement that a lot of things surround us, and we’re not alone. Yet, we generally forget that we have a lot around us that gives us harmony and piece within ourselves and we forget that because of our busy lives which we tend to keep up with his modern life and just priorities (sometimes we forget ourselves just to give important to materials). The example in this artwork means quite a lot to me as it is a great example on a student’s life, just like mine and a lot of others. Where we attend school, make a part time job to get some extra money to live on, go back home and continue with our studies which keeps on repeating itself a whole lot of weeks and yet we forget that we are still in our teenage lives and enjoy every minute as much as possible, yet to contradict myself when we’re done from a semester one feels too proud when he realise he have done too much and is now on a greater level and almost settled where he wants to be.
Going back to the digital artwork and his techniques, I don’t really know why the artist chose such technique as double exposure photography; yet I surely know that this was generally used to create ghostly looking images and this gave him a long way to combine other shots together. As Dan sticks to a surrealist style he still manages to create great compositions, yet I feel that a couple of his works fell short as there are quite a lot of almost the same looks where he uses human figures/portraits combined with buildings in black and grey, yet if one looks at his coloured ones he combines animals with humans (butterflies and female figure, tiger and male face).

His artwork have made great hit within the community as they are quite relevant for people in today’s life as we find his digital works printed on a lot of material we use these days i.e. mobile phone covers.