Salvador Dalí, Subconscious and Conscious mind

Being one of the most controversial artist during the Modern art period, Salvador Dali is recognised as one of the masters in Surrealism art. He called his works the "hand painted dream photograph" as he is well known for his craftsmanship in presenting unrealistic world in a realistic way. Dali is an admirer of Raphael who painted in photorealistic way. The key here is that, when an artwork is produced with realistic visual that looks like the real life object we seen everyday, even there's an illogical, against natural law, illusion in the work, it draws viewer's attention to rationalise the idea in the work.

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí

Paranoid Critical
In order for the artist to see the world differently to create his "dream" work, Salvador Dali developed a method to allow himself to enter into a Paranoid state that allow him to perceive the reality through subconscious mind. While entering into that mode, he still manage to critically record his illusion vision onto canvas clearly. I believe this is one of the reason he produces many master pieces of surrealism work. Besides that, I also agreed with the the way Dali explains about how subconscious and surrealism can be accepted during modern art period as quoted below:

“The subconscious has a symbolic language that is truly a universal language, for it speaks with the vocabulary of the great vital constants, sexual instinct, feeling of death, physical notion of the enigma of space—these vital constants are universally echoed in every human. To understand an aesthetic picture, training in the appreciation is necessary, cultural and intellectual preparation. For Surrealism the only re requisite is a receptive and intuitive human being.”

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory

Nuclear Mystical
Influenced by the scientific and philosophical concepts that dealing with consciousness, at this stage of Dali's work, he injected the idea of Quantum Mysticism into his works after WWII. At this time of his life, religion also played a role in his life. Above is his work The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory. Compared to the original work of The Persistence of Memory, this version has more details like bricks and horns. The sense of material is stronger.

Some of the philosophical claims of Quantum Mysticism include beliefs such as “There is no observer separate from reality and no separate reality from the observer.” Others include:

• The body is only perceived as solid matter, in essence made of energy and information.

• The mind and body are indivisible entities.

• Perception of reality is a learned action.

• The body transforms along with changing thoughts.

• Somatic reactions of the body are a product of awareness.

• There is a fundamental consciousness or intelligence that connects everyone.

• Time is a human perception, not reality.

Most of Dali's work are expressed through the presentation of consciousness and how it perceive reality. Before doing this research, I only look at the drawing at the object without the contextual understand of this part of Modernism period. Now that I learned this, I think I helps me to make better exploration into illusion art

Above are some of the quotes by Dali that I screen capture as a reference.



Other Reading:
http://www.theartstory.org/artist-dali-salvador.htm
http://www.dali-interart.be/pdf/DALI_SYMBOLS.pdf
http://samui-art-gallery.com/top-10-most-famous-dali-paintings/
http://www.slideshare.net/ljohnson60/surrealism-ppt?related=1
http://www.moodbook.com/history/modernism/salvador-dali.html
http://www.jstor.org/stable/425884
http://www.tufts.edu/programs/mma/fah188/clifford/Subsections/NuclearMysticism/nuclearmysticism.html

The origin of perspective and Renaissance

Reading source:
http://www.webexhibits.org/sciartperspective/raphaelperspective1.html
http://www.webexhibits.org/arrowintheeye/brunelleschi1.html
http://www.webexhibits.org/sciartperspective/perspective1.html
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/math5.geometry/unit11/unit11.html#reading


Before the an accurate way of calculating depth is proven by Filippo Brunellesci around 1425, painters were struggling to create realistic environment in their paintings. None can escape from the criticism of inaccurate perspective in their artwork. Being an architect and engineer, Brunellesci discovered the laws of one point perspective or linear perspective that creates accurate illusion of depth as how human eyes see the environment before us.

The video above is a demonstration of how Brunellesci proved his perspective-accurate drawing of through his peep show by turning his drawing backwards from the viewer, and let the artwork face the mirror in between the real world scene and the drawing. The reflection of the drawing falls on the mirror matches the real world angle of the viewers point of view.

This demonstration has caused a major impact to the artworks created during the Renaissance period. The basic principles of one-point-perspective includes a horizon line across the canvas which resembled viewer's point of view. A vanishing point where objects in the distance place will converge at one point. Every object appear in the scene will have their horizontal plane parallel to the horizon line and the side of the horizontal plane will connect to the vanishing point creating a distortion of the shape due to the depth of view in the scene. (refer to Picture 1)

Picture 1. Following the laws of One-point-perspective creates the illusion of depth in a flat surface

The video link above is a commentary mentioned how Brunellesci's perspective law impacted the Renaissance.