I Am an Amateur of Velocipedes 1941

Leonora Carrington made this drawing, I Am an Amateur of Velocipedes, with pencil on paper, and that title is a big wink to what’s going on here. Just look at the shading, see how she builds up the volume and texture of her strange machine with a tight hatching of lines? There’s a lot of love in those marks. It is clear she relishes the chance to describe the scene with such a simple tool. It really makes the piece. What I love about her work is how she could turn the mundane into something so mystical and unsettling. It reminds me a little bit of Remedios Varo, another great surrealist, who, like Carrington, could draw you into these really elaborate fantasy worlds. There are no answers, only more questions! Art, at its best, opens up these spaces of ambiguity, and Carrington invites us to get lost in them.