“I have no right to die and will never depart from this world because I’m a genius.”- Dali
Born in Figueras, Spain in 1904, Salvador Dali’s whole life is filled with legend.
Dali, a brilliant and imaginative painter, has made a major contribution to surrealism and arts in the twenty-first century at the aspects of making subjective world in dreams become objective images. Apart from drawings, his articles, eloquence, movement, appearance, moustache, all impress his admirers a lot. As the Spanish surrealist and graphic painters, Dali has gained great fames for his exploration of subconscious images.
At an early age when Dali studied fine arts in Madrid and Barcelona, his works reflected many artistic styles as well as his remarkable talents.
His painting style has not become mature until the end of 1920s. On the one hand, he has absorbed Ideas of Singmund Freud who has said, in his important works about the effects of sex upon subconscious images, that only when his sober mind becomes numb, the innocence and wildness hidden in a person’s body will become active; On the other hand, he has made friends with a group of brilliant surrealists in pairs who were trying to prove that sub-consciousness is “a more important reality” high above rationality.
In order to produce an image out of sub-consciousness, Dali began to induce visions by using a method self-described as the “critical state of paranoia“. Since then, his style rapidly became mature and his paintings drawn between 1929 and 1937 made him the most famous surrealist artists in the world.
In the dreams, he described in a weird and unreasonable manner, ordinary objects are twisted and deformed. Dali painted these images in a subtle and unerringly precise way and usually put them in a very desolate but sunny scenery. Among these riddle-like images, La persistencia de la memoria is the most famous one.
Created in 1931, La persistencia de la memoria is a typical representation of Dali’s surrealist style at the early stage. In this painting, on the open beach lies a horse-like ghost, on the front of which is a human head weirdly constituted of eyelashes, nose and tongue and next to which is a platform with a dead tree. Most surprisingly, many clocks in this painting become something soft and malleable. Appearing to be wilting, they are either hung on the tree, or hunched on the platform, or worn on the ghost’s back, as if these clocks, made from hard substance such as metals and marbles, has been worn out and loosen in a long period. Dali confessed that “personal dreamland and fantasyland revealed by Freud” was reflected in this painting, which is the result of his self-sub-consciousness and every idea in his dream written down in an indiscriminate and precise way. Besides, in order to find such as surrealist visions, Dali has ever tried to understand the consciousness of patients in mental hospitals and believed that their movements and speeches usually are the most honest representation of the mental world. With his well-developed skill, Dali delicately portrays those extraordinary images and details and creates a sense of reality inducing visions, which enables audiences to appreciate interesting sceneries hardly seen in the real world, and undergo a psycho experience of being free from orders in the real world.
A common characteristic can be traced in Dali’s works is that disconnected images in the real world are mixed together, for example, Facial Visions and Fruit Plate, in which fantastic scenery such as the gulf, waves, mountain, tunnels, a dog head image and railway viaduct across the neck strap of the dog head can be found. Hovered in the air, the dog’s middle body is constituted of a fruit plate full of pears which is integrated in a girl’s face. This girl’s eyes are made up of special shells on the beach, where is filled with extraordinarily weird images. As in the dream, something such as strings and tablecloth appear in an extraordinarily clear manner while other shapes are obscure and indistinguishable.
At the sight of Dali’s works, we cannot help signing, “this may be what surrealist drawings really attract us.” Dali’s method of making a comparison between illusive images and magic realism, stand his paintings out of all surrealist works. In his whole life, numerous well-liked and well-known artistic works had been created. These works all sparkles with his great talent and also bring boundless imagination to this world.
