Salvador Dali

Salvadore Felipe Jacinto Dali Y Domenech was born on May 11, 1904 . in Figueras, Spain. He was a Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker by trade. Dali is commonly regarded as having been “artistically influential for his explorations of subconscious imagery”. As an art student in Madrid and in Barcelona, Dali assimilated a vast number of artistic styles and displayed unusual technical facility as a painter. It was not until the late 1920 's however, that two events brought about the development of his mature artistic style. The first of these was Dali 's discovery of Sigmund Freud 's writings on the erotic significance of subconscious imagery and the second was Dali 's affiliation with the Paris Surrealists, a group of artists and writers who sought to establish the "greater reality" of man 's subconscious over his reason. To bring up images from the depths of his subconscious mind, Dali began to introduce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as "paranoiac critical." In essence, the paranoiac critical meant looking at one thing and seeing another. In my opinion, this is an extended version of "the face seen in the fire." Heads turn into a distant city, a landscape resolves itself as a still life, inexplicable combinations are seen to lurk magically beneath the skin of the world and thus the foundation for much Dali 's artistic philosophy is established. Once Dali hit on this method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1927 to 1937 he produced those paintings which made him the world 's best known Surrealist artist. Dali depicted a dream world in which commonplace objects are “juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion”. Dali portrayed these objects in meticulous, almost painfully realistic detail and usually placed them within bleak, sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland. Much of my research indicates that the most

Bibliography: Ades, Dawn, Dali and Surrealism (1982); Dali, S.,Salvador Dali: Diary of a Genius (1990); De Liano, I. G., Dali (1984); Descharnes, Robert, Dali (1984); Etherington-Smith, M., The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Salvador Dali (1993). Various internet sites