Monday, 9 January 2017

Salvador Dali

RESEARCH ON SALVADOR DALI IN RESPONSE TO RESEARCH: CONTEXT LECTURE

LIFE / UBRINGING
Salvador had an atypical upbringing, which undoubtedly lead to his strikingly bizarre artistic styles and influences later in life. Brought up by a strict disciplinary father and an encouraging, nurturing mother, this early environment left Dali with a host of issues. Named after his brother who died as a baby nine months before his birth, he was taken to his grave as a child and told he was his reincarnation, which he took to believe and became a reoccurring theme in some of his paintings. He stated "[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself, but conceived too much in the absolute." Often two droplets of water can be seen in his paintings in homage to this. In his youth he was also exposed to a book of explicit photos of advanced stage venereal diseases by his Father to 'educate' him, which left him with a warped concept of sexuality going into adulthood, manifesting itself in his artwork as symbolism for decay and putrification.

THEMES / ARTWORKS

His work predominantly centres around three themes, sexual symbolism, man's developments and experiences of the world and ideography. Ideography is the description of a concept without using formulated words or sounds such as roman numerals or safety symbols, and is something I regularly use in my own work and isn't dramatically different to the definition of my street alias, Sigil.

He also became wrapped up in what he called 'Nuclear Mysticism', a combined reaction both to his growing Catholicsism and also his shock and awe at the recent events in Hiroshima and the dawning of the nuclear age. This is most obvious in "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory", a sequel to his most popular painting, 'The Disintegration of Memory'. In this painting the world is seen to disintegrate, the spaces between objects suggestive of the discovery of the atom and the new knowledge that everything is comprised of minute, seperated bodies of atoms, with warhead shaped torpedoes arming in the distance. The scene now is mostly submerged underwater, symbolic for the unstoppable, life-changing nature of these discoveries and fish can be seen, which Dali often employed in his paintings to symbolise life. 
 DREAM CAUSED BY THE FLIGHT OF A BEE AROUND A POMEGRANATE...

In this painting Dali attempts to represent the way dreams act and react in imaginative ways based on outside stimulus. In this case the sting of a bee in reality is interpreted in a dream as a tiger with a bayonet pointed into the arm of his muse Gala. This was heavily influenced by the work of Sigmund Frued, particularly his book, "The Interpretation of Dreams" and attempted "to express for the first time in images Freud's discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up. Thus, as a bar might fall on the neck of a sleeping person, causing them to wake up and for a long dream to end with the guillotine blade falling on them, the noise of the bee here provokes the sensation of the sting which will awaken Gala."

This was also the first appearance of his stilt-legged elephant, which went on to appear in other paintings as a symbol for everything not being as it appears. I like the way he distances objects and characters from one another compositionally to express conceptual details, and ignores perspective and proportion when layering objects together to not only increase impact but also add a surreal sense of depth to his pieces. 

THE TEMPTATION OF SAINT ANTHONY

This painting is all about temptation, and the contrast between the worlds of gods and men. It does not actually show St. Anthony being tempted himself, as instead he actually commands the parad, led by a rearing horse, the symbol of strength

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