Salvador Dali

I chose 3 different paintings from Dali as he was an artist i researched into well for my first decade of 1930's-40's. I really admired his work and him as a person and thought his eccentric ways were something really worthwhile to aspire to and many people did as he influenced so many artists around him.

Although he didn't do many protraits, i still managed to find 3 different ones that i could end up portraying for my final image. One was Figure At Table (portrait of my sister) 1925.

I think the painting has been beautifully done and it's nice to see Dali create something real. The subject in the painting is his sister, and she is posing quite naturally. The way she has her head on the hand and is looking down at her other which seems to be agitated, could show that she is in deep thought about something. A lot of emotion is shown in this picture, and it appears she could be nervous, upset or just in deep thought.

Also the wrap that is around her body is blue, which symbolizes calmness, wisdom and relaxation, like the ocean which is a big symbol for the colour blue. This comes across quite well in the photo as the pose that the model is doing does reflect on the calm relaxed moods of the colour blue, where as blue can also mean depression and sadness and mourning, which I think again the pose compliments, so there are quite a few different meanings to this photo and it can be portrayed in lots of different ways depending on who looks at it in different ways.

There is also a white cloth laying next to the model, I'm not to sure of the significance of this, although looking back to my colour phycology research the colour white symbolizes purity and innocence, so Dali could have been trying to put across these emotions also when placing the white cloth next to his sister in the picture.

The back ground is quite shadowy and blurred, the colour is dark and subdued making the model stand out a lot more which i think was taken into consideration when Dali painted this. His sister is leaning against a light browny grey table, there isn't much to the background at all but i think that's done on purpose as the moods and pose of the model can be clearly shown even more.

At the time, surrealism was just getting very popular with the public and that was the main art movement at the time. I wouldnt say this painting relates to surrealism, but i think that again was done on purpose as almost all of dalis painting, films, photos and life was based around surrealism so for him to do a painting totally unrelevant to his surrealist work was very different for him and his works and could have been because he had painted a family member.

I think he aimed this photo at no one other than his sister, he did quite a few paintings of her and also his brother who had passed away, so i thnik the target market will have been his family members.