Canadian painter Stephen X. Arthur is a former experimental/fine-art filmmaker/animator, screenwriter, and technical/scientific writer. He has an MFA degree in film production (U. Southern California) and an MSc degree in neuroscience (U. British Columbia). As an INTJ personality type, his strength is introverted intuition; in later life, he became an intuitive painter. He creates Surrealist Symbolist paintings, where the spontaneous figurative images often produce a kind of cinematic narrative with unexpected meanings and layers of ambiguity that make people think and feel beyond their conventional assumptions.


"While art movements have tended historically to be about the beauty or quality of the object produced, Surrealism produces art as a means rather than an end. It differs from standard avant-gardes in its refusal of originality and newness for their own sake. The [standard] avant-garde pushes the boundaries of aesthetics toward ever renewed expressive forms; Surrealism tends instead to use forms, new or traditional, as tools with which to express a particular spirit. This spirit is above all one of dissidence and defiance, subtended by a belief in the inexhaustible capacity for wonder that resides in each of us, here and now."
— Mark Polizzotti, Why Surrealism Matters, 2024,
Yale University Press.

Presented in chronological sequence as indicated by the number given in each painting title. Painted May 2021 through January 2025.