Biography: Salvador Dali

By admin · Friday, February 5th, 2010

Salvador Dali described himself and his lifestyle with these words: “The only difference between me and a madman is the fact that I am not mad.” Were it not for the paintings, the books he wrote, the movies he collaborated on and the witnesses of others who observed him at work and at play, we might be tempted to disagree with him.

We might want to say, no, you were mad, else how could you have lived the life you lived. It is not normal for a human being to live insanely in a sane world, or to live sanely in an insane world. Yet, that is precisely what the enigmatic artist known as Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali, born May 11th 1904 in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain did.

All of us have seen pictures of his painting of a melting watch and have seen pictures of his other bizarre paintings that looked like photographs. They were not photographs but were meticulously painted works of art celebrating the humdrum of life. If the subject matter had not been contray to nature they could easily have been mistaken for photographs. It was the subject matter of his paintings and his bizarre life style that caused many to question his sanity. It was finally decided that he was not only a genius at what he did, and that of course was getting attention. He had a way of promoting himself that made others sit up and take notice.

He went through painting labels fast and furiously: He sampled Cubism, Futurism, and Metaphysical Painting and finally settled with the one title that is used in identifying his style to this day, surrealism. Surreal painting is painting that depicts a dream life and its subject matter is derived from the deep dark other world of the painter. It’s as if the artist or poet gets glimpses of this other part of their psyche and brings it forward into consciousness where they paste it down on canvases and force a frightened public to take a look. Some of course, do this for shock value and probably make a lot of it up or copy from another, but Dali was an original. His dreams like sequences were his own.

What makes his artwork and his lifestyle different is that apparently his style was genuine. He took art lessons as a young boy. His first drawing lesson was at age ten; at age fourteen he had his first one man show. He attended the Royal Academy of Art in Madrid but did not stay to take the final exam. He thought he knew more than those who were testing him.

In 1928, at the age of twenty-four he first learned of Surrealism. It was in Paris

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