Delving into Dali

Delving into Dali


Salvador Dali

Spanish Surrealist Artist

(Born May 11, 1904 – Died January 23, 1989)

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol known as Salvador Dalí was a prominent Spanish Surrealist artist born in Figueres in the Catalonia region of Spain, close to the border of France.

In addition to being a painter, Dalí worked in film, sculpture, photography and even fashion, often with other artists. He was a highly skilled draftsman, meaning that he drew really, really well! (This helps if you want to be a painter.)

Dali_1The Mae West Lips Sofa, 1937

Dalí was a pretty wild character. He grew a huge mustache, which became a trademark.

He drew attention for his wild and unusual clothes and style.  (Sounds like our friend, the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, with her long skirts, and wild hairdos). He had long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings, and old-fashioned style pants that buttoned at the knees called “knee-breeches”. He sometimes wore a cape, and carried a walking stick.


Dali used a very realistic technique to create his paintings, and put strange, unreal, dream-like images in them.  This was his style of “Surrealism”, an art style that began in the 1920s. In his paintings, he would create a reality from his dreams, thus changing reality from what it was, to what he imagined, or maybe, wanted to see.  This became his way of life and making art.

Dali_5La Main (Les Remords de conscience), 1930

Surrealist artists painted sometimes shocking and nonsensical scenes very realistically, which make them even stranger. They painted bizarre creatures made of everyday objects. Things that we never see together in the “real” world show up together in their painting, surprising, amusing or even scaring us, the viewer.

Dali_3The Persistence of Memory, 1931

Dalí painted some things that he wanted to represent certain ideas. For example, the “melting watches” in the painting The Persistence of Memory tell us that time can feel different at different times: same five minutes can go very quickly, or seem to go on forever. This idea came to him when he was staring at a runny piece of cheese on a hot summer day. That cheese must have really been melting.

Dali_4Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion, 1954