9 February 2009

etsy:
“A New Meditation” from etsy seller blamethemoon

This piece is a print. The iconography of the image itself is an homage or an allusion to the famous Salvador Dali painting “Meditative Rose,” oil on canvas, 1958. Dali’s painting depicts a landscape with a detailed, but very much truncated by proportion, of desert-like land (typical in many of his paintings), where proportionally most of the canvas depicts sky. In the middle of Dali’s canvas is a red rose blossom; which is floating by virtue of it’s position in relation to the landscape. blamethemoon’s “A New Mediation” repeats the elements and color themes of Dali’s paining, through the landscape and red rose. It deviates from Dali’s piece in that (and mind you, my source material is a jpeg image online) this is a print of either an actual physical collage or a digital collage. So, where Dali’s piece is a painting, blamethemoon’s piece is a combination of photographs and other elements. blamethemoon’s work also differs in subject matter; in other words, it isn’t just a translation of the Dali piece by means of different media. blamethemoons piece trades the stereotypical Dali desert ground for a combination of simulated desert juxtaposed with the Cleveland skyline, as an homage to her hometown (as Dali’s desert was an homage to the geography of his childhood). Also differing in blamethemoon’s piece is the proportional ratio of ground to sky. Dali’s piece is proportionally dominated by sky, blamethemoon’s piece has a larger field of ground, and therefore less sky. blamethemoon’s work also depicts the silhouette forms of two people in the foreground. In addition to the specificity of the location, this deviation creates additional symbolism to the piece, which is differential on whether the viewer sees the two figures as walking toward or away from the skyline. Overall, blamethemoon’s piece is aesthetically pleasing: in so much that as a process, the collage elements act on the graphic plane in concert, and act consistently in their level of detail. In other words, all the elements of the image depict a consistent form (photo-realism) as opposed to one element presenting a different image quality. The image itself has immediate points of reference to the painting it serves to interpret, but the image stands on its own in terms of composition; you don’t need to be entirely aware of the original work it borrows from to derive intrigue.

available at:
blamethemoon: http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=6287639

song:
“Peaches En Regalia” by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention from the album “Hot Rats”
listen

artist:
Salvador Dali

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali I Domenech (11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989) was a Catalan artist best known as a Surrealist, and thus for his surrealist paintings. Dali was born in Figueres, Spain. He studied at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. He had his first one man show in Barcelona in 1925. As an artist he flirted with the styles of Cubism and Futurism before he became affiliated with Surrealism, of which he would ultimately be a dominant force and progenitor. In 1929 he met Gala Eluard, who became his muse, lover, business manager, and ultimately his wife in 1934. As a surrealist painter, Dali’s compositions were determined through his self-invented “Paranoiac-critical method.” Dali defined this as the “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” Dali’s work is best known by it canonical images: blue sky, desert landscape, melting watches, distended limbs, religious iconography, ants, and the dead olive tree. Perhaps his most well known work “The Persistence of Memory” was painted in 1931. Dali was known, not just as a painter, but as a flamboyant character perhaps just as visual as his paintings with elaborate outfits and his waxed moustache. Dali also created works as in sculpture, film, and photography.

Virtual Dali
Salvador Dali Museum
Salvador Dali Gallery
artcyclopedia
artchive
Wikipedia

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