Salvador Dali...Dreamscapes and More

The painting above is called The Persistence of Memory. Dali painted this in 1931 when he was 27 years old. He was, by this time, one of the most famous of the Surrealist artists. Surrealism attempts to portray, through contrasting and illogical imagry, the landscapes of the subconcious mind. Dali was greatly influenced by the new ideas put forward by Sigmund Freud, the father of psycho-analysis. I am fascinated by the ability of Dali to provoke the subconcious mind, to entice it into the conciousness of the viewer, and to allow the viewer to wander into the dreamscapes that he has so skillfully, and sometimes playfully, placed before us.

As a student Dali was exposed to, and mastered, many different styles of painting. From Impressionism to Cubism and from the traditional to the bizzarre, he displayed a talent and a curiousity that would not diminish as he grew older. His personality was as surreal and individual as any work he created. He worked in many different medias and was very much a product of the twentieth century. He used film, literature, music, and television to promote himself, his work, and his vision of the world.

This painting is called The Face of War. He painted this in 1940. By this time he had already seen WWI, the Spanish civil war, and the outbreak of WWII..he was 36 years old. Pictured here is a tormented face, surrounded by serpents. Each tortured orifice of this face is filled with skulls, and each of those skulls is also filled. Death upon death...on and on

This painting is a portrait of the wonderful Mae West. Dali painted this in 1934. I love the way that the portrait is delivered as an optical illusion, at first a room, perhaps an art gallery, and then then the face. Dali often did this in his work. He used to induce a mental state in himself, a sort of double-vision paranoia, and then draw his hallucinations. Seeing faces in clouds and patterned wallpaper is as close as I can come to describing this state. But Dali took this to delightful extremes.

I will leave you with a Dali quote: "One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams. "