Rene Magritte Paintings and photograph

It seems very appropriate to post this photograph on Gather today. It is Valentine's Day and the day that Gather launched a huge release full of new features. The code name happens to be Magritte for this release. All of Gather's site enhancement releases are named after artists.

Belgian Surrealist known for mysterious and witty paintings. Using a deliberately banal painting style, he sought to penetrate the boredom of everyday life to reach something fantastic. He used his camera in much the same way, making photographs that manage to shimmer mysteriously, appearing by turns extraordinarily dull and extraordinary. He frequently posed his friends and more often his wife Georgette in tableaux with the same deadpan approach as is characteristic of his paintings; other images, however, are more casual, apparently recording the doings of Magritte and his fellow Surrealists.

Rene Magritte's original paintings "Les Amonts" were created in 1927. Magritte made several variations on this theme. According to Magritte biographers he painted these images in reaction to the occasion of the drowning death of his mother. The scene was called to the canvas as a reaction to seeing his mother pulled from a river with her dress wrapped around her head as she was taken from the water.