Salvador Dali -- Paintings & Biography

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dali y Domenech was born on May 11, 1904 in Catalonia, Spain nine months after his older brother, also named Salvador, died of gastroenteritis. At the age of 5, Dali's lawyer father and housewife mother took him to the grave of his namesake and told that he was his brother reincarnated. His mother encouraged Dali's artistic endeavors, allowing him to attend drawing school as a teenager. When she died young of breast cancer in 1921, her son was grief-stricken, though surprisingly he did not object to his father later marrying his deceased wife's sister.

Dali studied at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid where his handlebar mustache, long hair, sideburns and style of dressing that resembled menswear of the 1800's earned him a reputation as being eccentric. Luckily, his Cubist works gained him an even better reputation as an up and coming artist. After being expelled in 1926 for stating that no faculty member was competent enough to examine him, Dali went on meet with Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro.

In 1931, he painted the surrealistic melting clocks and pocketwatches of The Persistence of Memory, a piece which illustrates Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, rethinks the rigidity of time and it's subsequent, man-imposed restraints, and would later go on to become one of his most famous works. Dali married his muse, Gala, in 1934 and began exhibiting in New York City where he became an instant sensation, eventually moving to the states in 1940. Dali later began experimenting with bulletism, which involves shooting ink at a canvas, holography, which reproduces images in three dimensions, and even optical illusions.

Clocks, elephants, eggs and ants were common symbols frequently seen in his artwork. According to wikipedia.org, "The elephant is a distortion in space, its spindly legs contrasting the idea of weightlessness with structure." The egg is supposedly representative of life, the intrauterine process of a woman ovulating to create a child. As for the reoccurrence of bees and ants in his creations, locusts are a symbol of waste and fear, and when Dali discovered his pet bat dead one day and covered with ants he became fascinated by these carriers of decomposition.

From 1910 to 1983, Dali created over 1,500 paintings and even produced Destino, an animated short with Walt Disney which was finally released in 2003 after being in the works since 1945. However, when his beloved Gala passed away on June 10, 1982, Dali supposedly attempted several botched suicides, first by dehydrating himself, then by surviving a fire in his bedroom of "mysterious origin." Seven unlucky years later, Salvador Dali died of heart failure on January 23, 1989 at the ripe old age of 84. He is buried at the Dali Theater and Museum in his hometown of Figueres.

His works can be seen at the Dali Theater and Museum in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain as well as the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Other large collections are featured at the Salvador Dali Gallery in Pacific Palisades, California and the Dali Universe in London.

"I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly."

"I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait."

"I don't take drugs: I am drugs."

"I have Dalínian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous."

"Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings."

"There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction."

"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing."

"When I was five years old I saw an insect that had been eaten by ants and of which nothing remained except the shell. Through the holes in its anatomy one could see the sky. Every time I wish to attain purity I look at the sky through flesh."