The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has this to say of Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings.
[they were] unplanned and shaped by accidents and intuitive decisions but often seem to carry memories of ‘primitive’ art objects he should have seen in books and museums.
Something of this spilled into his early paintings. Many of them represent animals, but they are seldom of the real ones we know of; more often they represent what he has described as ‘a probable animal that had unaccountably missed its chance of existence’ or ‘a bird that only can soar in our dreams’.
I am most interested in artists that imagine and express something that does not yet exist in the world:
New perspectives, like that of M C Escher’s Hand With Reflecting Sphere
Or new worlds that deal with new issues, like Neal Stephenson’s books Anathem, REAMDE and (although I read it much too late to have the impact it could have had), Snow Crash.
Or fevered visualisations of otherworldly concepts like Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and – in principle – Tagore’s early paintings.
Finally, I’m reminded of Salman Rushdie’s answer to what his book The Satanic Verses was about:
[it] celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and bit of that is how newness enters the world.
I read this years ago (the answer is from 1991) and it made an instant impact on me.