Salvador Dali
On this page I will show my research on one of my chosen artists, Salvador Dali. Perspective is one of my biggest weaknesses in drawing, therefore, I chose Dali as one of my artists because of how effective perspective is in his work. Perspective is an important technique to understand in both animation and drawing, it creates an illusion of a of three dimensional space on a two dimensional surface. In animation particularly, perspective is relevant when you want to move a character closer or further away from the camera.
Salvador Dali was mid 20th century, Spanish artist who painted with the traditional material of oil paints. Dali was a part of the Surrealism, Expressionism, Post-Impressionism period of art, during these periods Dali produced a range of surreal paintings based on his dreams and hallucinations, giving the audience a range of strange point of views. The gallery below showcases some of Dali's art work produced through his life.
I really like a lot of Dali's work, when I think of abstract art work, his work is always the first to come to my mind. My favourite piece of Dali's work is his 1946's 'Temptation Of St Anthony', as shown on the right. In this piece we can see a horse being ready to attack, followed by a group of surreal-looking elephants. What I like the most about this piece is how it's able to make an audience feel vulnerable with its threatening atmosphere from the horse. I think this is because the painting has an ant's eye view, also known as a three point perspective- we're seeing the man in the painting's point of view and how small and powerless he feels against the giant-like horse.
If I could change anything about Dali's artwork, it would be the backgrounds of some of his piece. A lot of the backgrounds look similar, despite being different paintings.
Feeling inspired by Dali's work, I decided to create my own pieces of art work in Dali's style, as shown below. I don't usually remember my dreams when I wake up, unlike Dali, therefore I decided to take pictures of ordinary objects and paint them in an abstract manner. The paintings I created didn't take too long to create, similar to the impressionism era, I didn't sketch them out prior and decided to just go straight into painting, I done this because I thought it would help make the paintings look more surreal. I really like how my pieces turned out, particularly the book piece because of its three point perspective. If I could go back and change anything, I would have painted in oil paints rather than acrylic because that's the material Dali used for his paintings.
