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.

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.
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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