Frottage - an art technique
What is "FROTTAGE"?
Well, it's a fancy French word that means "texture rubbing".
It is a technique in the visual arts of obtaining textural effects or images by rubbing lead, chalk, charcoal, etc., over paper laid on a granular or relief-like surface.
Frottage is a surrealist and ‘automatic’ method of creative production that involves creating a rubbing of a textured surface using a pencil or other drawing material.
Surrealist automatism is a method of art making in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, allowing the unconscious mind to have great sway. Early 20th century Dadaists, such as Hans Arp, made some use of this method through chance operations. Surrealist artists, most notably André Masson, adapted to art the automatic writing method of André Breton and Philippe Soupault who composed with it Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields) in 1919.[1] The Automatic Message (1933) was one of Breton's significant theoretical works about automatism.
The technique was developed by Max Ernst in drawings made from 1925. Frottage is the French word for rubbing. Ernst was inspired by an ancient wooden floor where the grain of the planks had been accentuated by many years of scrubbing. The patterns of the graining suggested strange images to him. From 1925 he captured these by laying sheets of paper on the floor and then rubbing over them with a soft pencil. The results suggest mysterious forests peopled with bird-like creatures and Ernst published a collection of these drawings in 1926 titled Histoire Naturelle (natural history).
He went on to use a wide range of textured surfaces and quickly adapted the technique to oil painting, calling it "grattage" (scraping). In grattage the canvas is prepared with a layer or more of paint then laid over the textured object which is then scraped over. In Ernst’s Forest and Dove the trees appear to have been created by scraping over the backbone of a fish.
Max at work:
