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“I don't do drugs. I am drugs “(Salvador Dali). This quote mentioned by Dali, is well known by the society and gives a clue of the personality he used to have. A crazy, different, unique, strong and confident personality. Salvador Dali is one of the most famous artists that have ever existed. His unique personality and creativity led him to create awesome art pieces that today are well known all over the world. I got interested in this topic since the day I got the privilege to see one of his art pieces at a museum. I really liked his way of transmitting emotions through a painting. Before researching about him, I felt that if I really like his paintings I should know some background about him and these pieces.

 At the beginning of this research, I only knew some of his art pieces and some facts of his life. But during research I realized there is a lot of interesting facts about his life that I was missing. He influenced a lot of people mostly artists during their career. I really looked forward in searching for the art pieces he realized and his influence in Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism and Metaphysical painting. Also what he wanted to show in each one, the message he wanted to transmit.

I found a lot of useful information; most of it was biographies. Since I had many places to choose information from, I decided to take pieces and main ideas of information from the different websites and created a biography with this. This was useful since there wasn’t a website that had them all. I also looked at books for information but I could only find his biography and some paintings at an encyclopedia.

EBSCO, a resource school gave us, was a really useful resource; I found most of the biography of Salvador Dali there, also some of his paintings. I found it a helpful source for finding information since it is opened to many options of research.  Brain Quote was a useful website too. There, I found most of the famous quotes from Dali like the following: “I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject; rather does the person grow to look like his portrait” (Salvador Dali). This quote shows how a big character is Salvador and the strong confidence he has for himself.

Who is Dali?

Salvador Domnigo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domenech, recognized better as Salvador Dali, was a Spanish painter. But he also made important contributions as a sculptor, graphic artist, and as a designer.

He was born on May 11, 1904 in Girona, son of Salvador Dalí Cusí and his wife Felipa Domenech Ferres. Years later his sister Anna Maria was born. The first school Salvador attended to didn’t work, so he went to a Hispano-French school and learned French. Salvador started to get interested in art when he spent time at the Molí de la Torre, a building owned by a family of artists. There the discovered impressionism. Later he attended to a Drawing school at his home town. Since Dali was more into art, he became part of an exhibition at the municipal theater (that later became the Dalí Theater-Museum.

He and some of his friends founded a magazine, in which he published personal impressions and private memories. His father made a condition so Dalí could become a painter; he had to go to Madrid at the Fine Arts School. And Dalí accepted to do so.

His mother died at 1921, and the following year his father married Catalina Domenech, the deceased woman´s sister. At Madrid, Salvador got several awards and attended to the Special Painting, Sculpture and Engraving School (Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando). He got expelled from the school and went back to Figueres. There, his first art professor teached him the technique of etching. Salvador really wanted to return to the Special Painting, Sculpture and Engraving School, so he did, but repeating the year.

After participating in several exhibitions, he went to Paris where he met Picasso and visited the Louvre Museum. Years later he decided to really devote on painting.

At the beginning he was in the areas of Cubism, Futurism, and Metaphysical Painting. And at 1992, he joined the surrealists. Surrealism features a theme of an element of surprise, the unknown. This cultural movement is known for its visual art works and started World War I at Paris.

 Salvador’s art flourished during this surrealist age. He took the concept of surrealism and transformed it into a more positive method, which he named it as “critical paranoia”. His paintings had a lot of creativity, he claimed that eccentricity and exhibitionism where the source of his creative energy. Dali claimed that this method he transformed should be only used in artistic and poetical creation, but also in the affairs of daily life.  Most of his paintings used an unreal dream-like technique, where hallucinatory characters contributed to his imagery.

Salvador Dali said, “The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret” (Brainy quote).  When it comes to Dali’s point of view of his paintings, he thought of them as a “hand painted dream photographs”. And his favorite characters and images he used where human figures with half open drawers, burning giraffes, and watches that bent as if made of wax; but these where just some of them.

Salvador adopted a more traditional style when he visited Italy in 1937. This and political views made him leave the Surrealist ranks. His output also included book illustration, jewelry design, and work for the theatre. With collaboration of luis Buñuel he made his first surrealis films: Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Age d'or (1930). He also contributed a dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). He wrote a novel named hidden faces (1944) and volumes of his autobiography. There are some museums devoted to Dalí's work in Figueras, his home town in Spain, and in St Petersburg in Florida. ("Salvador Dali Biography .")

The persistence of Memory (La persistència de la memòria)

The persistence of memory is considered the most famous art piece of Salvador Dali finished at 1931, or as many people recognize it, “the painting with the melted watches”. This painting is recently found in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

It portrays a fetus-like head lying on the ground, like a fish that was washed ashore and now decaying after a lost struggle. There are also four pocket watches in this painting, three of which appear to be molten, as if made out of cheese. And the fourth watch is in a normal state. The drooping watches possible show the irrelevance of time during sleep, as some people think. Some historians come to the conclusion that the painting may be an idea of Einstein's theory of relativity: that time it is relative and not fixed.

Another aspect and detail that is not easy to spot at first sight is the way Dali uses light to communicate the ideas of his painting. The persistence of memory makes the viewer look at consciousness as “the light at the end of the tunnel”. ("Famous paintings bySalvador Dalí.")

Dali would make ridiculous and silly explanations for his paintings to mislead people. And this painting is an example of it. By doing this Dali not only opened the doors for discussion for many interpretations of his art, but also made nearly impossible for people to understand and criticize his work he thought has less intellect than himself. Another example of this and with the same intentions is Leonardo DaVinci, when he wrote backwards and upside down in his journals, so his work could only be read when looked at a mirror’s reflection.