Salvador Dali- Paintings and Design Analysis

The Persistence of Memory(1931)

A lot of Dali's painting were influenced and inspired by the landscapes of his youth. Several paintings were painted on the slope of Mount Pani, which was covered in beautiful umbrella pines at the time. Many of the strange and foreboding shadows in the foreground of many paintings is a  direct reference to and result of Dali's love of this mountain near his home. Even he had grown up, Dali continued to paint details of the landscape of  Ca talonia into his work, such as this famous product-The Persistence of Memory in 1931.

In this Dali's memorable work, indeed the one which he is associated to The persistence of memory. There was a craggy rocks of Cape Creus in the background to the right, it shows the rocks of his beloved Cape Creus jutting up in the picture. In the foreground, a sort of amorphous self portrait of Dali seem to be melt. There are three separate melting watch images in the foreground of the work. Salvador Dali was inspired with the melting watch because he saw a Camembert Cheese was softer in the summer heat. The melting watch is a symbol commonly associated with Dali's surrealism, and showed the irrelevance of time.

In short, this particular work is an important refferal back to Dali' Cantalan Heritage, it is important to him.

Element of Design

- line got straight and curve but clear.
-the shape is a bit strange but is in reality

-saturated and easily to define any of shape

-organized and solid

-do not have eye movement

Principle of Design

-Hierarchy,from behind to in front,will have background.

-it is Balance

-always creative and brain storming
-will think that why can draw like this

-the object size is sometime different

-Harmony

The Anthropomorphic Cabinet (1936)

In order to paint this figure of a woman half lying on the ground, Dali did several very elaborate preliminary drawing in pencil and ink. The first time Anthropomorphic Cabinet exhibited in London in1936 at Lefevre Gallery.

Old Age, Adolescence, Infancy (The three ages -1940)

This work "old age, adolescence infancy(The three ages) was completed in 1940, near the time when Dali and Gala fled from France in anticipation of the coming Nazi invasion. It was during this time that Dali was being primed by Gala to move away from his surrealistic root and towards more common  and traditional themes. The work utilizes Dali's now mature double imagery techniques to transform elements from the Catalan coastline into three separate and distinct faces that represent the three so called "ages" man.

The center face is the adolescent face, it formed from the combination of the towering cliffs in the backgroud and the figures of both Lucia(his nursemaid) and Dali himself,both with their backs to us. The cliffs both have an eye superimposed on them, and Lucia's clothing is creased in such a way that these elements combine to form the face of young man, perhaps in his twenties.

To the far right, the final face, that of the infant, is also formed from the combination of both scenery and a figure in the scenery. The cliffs to the far right form the edge of the face, while the figure of the netmender, sitting with her back towards us, helps to form up the nose, mouth and teeth of the smiling infant. 

All together, these faces create an ambitious double image painting that makes extensive use of elements from Dali's past that were important to him. In many ways, he himself may have been trying to directly express how these elements had a profound effect on him, and were central to his being.