One of the most celebrated artists of all time.
One of the reasons I took this recent mini break was to get a better feel for the attitudes and the work of the marvel. Salvador Dali.
Few artists have had such a profound effect on the way people think today as Salvador Dali.
Yet in old age Dali became a recuse…
Another reason is my own work has reached a very high level technicaly and with compositions ; thus it is time to push on my frontires, harder.
I recall Toulouse Lautrec said « at last I have learnt how not to draw ».
I know what he meant.
It is hard to stop paintings turning into very good conventional paintings. Sometimes I don’t want to stop them, particularly my celebrated marine paintings.
Sea men like precision and correct technical detail, I’m ‘known’ for that.
I like that.
Wine art, in particular my Wine Villages of Bordeaux project presents me with fresh challenges, opportunity to take bigger risks, to explore in way entirely new to me hence my visit to Cadaques and the home of Salvador Dali.
Dali took to the Surrealist theory of automatism transforming it into a more positive method which he named `Critical Paranoia’.
Dali’s painting of « The Persistence of Memory », (remember the melting clocks?) was a major breakthrough.
Significantly Gala Dali, his wife, acted as his agent helping Dali rapidly become the most famous representative of Surealism, to become THE surealist movement, together they cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism.
According to Dali’s theory one should cultivate genuine delusion as in ‘clinical paranoia’ while remaining residually aware at the back of one’s mind that the control of the reason and will has been deliberately suspended.
His paintings employed a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal `dream’ space he depicted.
He claimed that this method should be used in artistic and poetical creation; also in the affairs of daily life.
Today Critical Paranoia is often used in forms of latteral thinking and ‘brainstorming’.
Dali’s technically excellent yet highly unusual paintings, sculptures and visionary explorations in painting, film and life-size interactive art ushered in a new generation of imaginative expression.
I like that.
I’d particularly envy his chance to work in film…
Dali was invited by Alfred Hitchcock’s to contribute to the sets used for Spellbound (1945) and later worked with Walt Dysney.
From his personal life to his professional endeavors, he always took great risks.
I admire that.
Dali proved how rich the world can be when you dare and few people dare, to embrace boundless creativity.
Napolean famously said, « don’t give me a good general give me a lucky one ».
Dali was lucky too.
Dali’s wife Gala recognised and actively encouraged his talent for self-publicity, for clowning.
Their marriage lasted 50 years.
Together, from their Cadaques home cove they charted waters never previously navigated…
