When I paint, the sea roars. The others splash about in the bath.

Salvador Dali

Born: May 11, 1904 - January 23, 1989
Nationality: Spanish
Field: Painting, Drawing, Photography, Sculpture, Writing
Training: San Fernando School of Fine Arts, Madrid
Movement: Cubism, Dada, Surrealism

Brief History: Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), commonly known as Salvador Dalí, was a prominent Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres.

Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to a self-styled "Arab lineage," claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior, in order to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.

I had always been a fan of Salvador Dali, he has been an amazing influence on my art. But I never really grasped what an amazing artist he was until I visited the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, FL, it has one of the world's largest collections of Dali's works.

It was the first time that I had been surrounded by so many famous paintings in my life, not to mention that they were all by one of my favorite artists. I couldn't believe that one person could create so many amazing pieces of art.

Dali was a very eccentric person, and his art often reflected his madness! Yet from all of his oddities we are left with one of the most recognized pieces of art work, The Persistence of Memory.



The melting clocks, the arid landscape, the mountains in the background - they all seem to be such random objects, yet grouped together they form a striking painting that seems to be seered into the memory.