Today, I drempt Salvador Dali hugged and kissed me. He gave me his blessings in a cool blueish damply lit room near his home in Figueres.
He said nothing and all I could do is cry as he when to pick from a wall of paintings, one to give me. I remember his hair styled as Velazquez and pearlescent light obscuring his features.
It was real enough to make me question if it really did happen. As I woke I could feel my face in the contortions of a cry.
BTW: Yes, I realize this is a self portrait of Velazquez but this is a representation of how the dream look and felt...
"The muse of mortality
Vanitas paintings became a popular genre in the 17th century, usually juxtaposing lush still lifes with skulls as reminders that death waits on all of us. Plunking a traditional example by an unknown 17th century artist in the middle of Dali's surrealist works may confuse at first because Dali didn't paint vanitas as we think of them.
But the show argues that he created his own versions in numerous works using elongated heads resembling skulls. It's a valid point; mortality and death were constant refrains in his paintings, and, related to them, the passage of time - and those melting clocks.
His is a sensibility in some ways far different from the earlier art, as would be expected. He shares with some of them the sense of heightened drama, of freighting the ordinary with larger qualities. In that context, Dali's distortions can be viewed as inheritors of El Greco's famous attenuations."
Tampa Bay Times
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published February 11, 2007
He said nothing and all I could do is cry as he when to pick from a wall of paintings, one to give me. I remember his hair styled as Velazquez and pearlescent light obscuring his features.
It was real enough to make me question if it really did happen. As I woke I could feel my face in the contortions of a cry.
BTW: Yes, I realize this is a self portrait of Velazquez but this is a representation of how the dream look and felt...
"The muse of mortality
Vanitas paintings became a popular genre in the 17th century, usually juxtaposing lush still lifes with skulls as reminders that death waits on all of us. Plunking a traditional example by an unknown 17th century artist in the middle of Dali's surrealist works may confuse at first because Dali didn't paint vanitas as we think of them.
But the show argues that he created his own versions in numerous works using elongated heads resembling skulls. It's a valid point; mortality and death were constant refrains in his paintings, and, related to them, the passage of time - and those melting clocks.
His is a sensibility in some ways far different from the earlier art, as would be expected. He shares with some of them the sense of heightened drama, of freighting the ordinary with larger qualities. In that context, Dali's distortions can be viewed as inheritors of El Greco's famous attenuations."
Tampa Bay Times
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published February 11, 2007