Salvador Dali

As you all know, Salvador was a bit of a genius, and a bit of an oddball at the same time. I decided to do my 2nd essay about him, because I have always been fascinated by his 'Persistence of Memory' Painting. While analysing it, I never actually realised how deep it is.. it's all about his beliefs in time & memory. Basically warping what we believe is possible. He was all into Einstein's theory of relativity, and well basically my essay got a bit deep... here is an example..

In conclusion to this, time and memory both rely on individual perception of events, and both can alter in perception after the events. Our memory affects time and time affects our memory - both ultimately clashing to form our individual reality. I think that this is truly what Salvador Dali’s paintings were about, even though it was clearly hidden under the surface. These ideas then went on to produce his most finest works, and the ‘Persistence of Memory,’ his most iconic.

Yeh, it's a bit of a mind fuck isn't it. Anyway my brain has been overheating, so I will leave you with one of Dali's and Luis Benel's surrealist movie, "Un Chien Andalou."


Un chien Andalou (1928)

John Hegley

Okay, well a while back we had an option of getting involved in the John Hegley project where we had to do a little animation for a letter in the alphabet that was made into a poem.
Mine was.... R is for your river, watch it flood into an ocean. So here it is.. in it's completed format...

Da Vinci @ Manchester's Science Musuem

Well, I am thinking he is a bit of a genius; went to visit his works at the MOSI at last.
Found out some pretty interesting stuff I never actually realised about his work.
After that lecture we had about him like back last year, I never realised how far one person's mind can expand. Not only was he a great thinker, but he was also an inventor, a scientist who invented stuff that, in the future would be great significance to us now; with the brains to boot.
I shall give you a quick intro:
He had a keen eye and quick mind that led him to make important scientific discoveries, yet he never published his ideas.
He was a gentle vegetarian who loved animals and despised war, yet he worked as a military engineer to invent advanced and deadly weapons.
He was one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, yet he left only a handful of completed paintings
He's an idol to say the least, he encourages us to use our mind and keep trying. He was born illegitamate, so he couldn't become a doctor or a politician. We see this as an advantage anyway, because he proved to be one of the greatest minds that existed... well in my personal opninion anyway..
In the exhibition there was a whole section about the Mona Lisa which was fascinating, like where it had been, what had happened to it.. etc.
I read that on it's travels it had been kept in secret by a worker at some musuem in Italy who was a builder I think, and had flecked a bit of paint near her eye by accident.. There was some crazy Bolivian who had a thrown a rock at it... and some varnish had been removed by accident. I have seen the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, but I didn't actually look at it as much as I did at the MOSI.. as I had never realised she was wearing veil!... The colour it is today is nothing compared to what it used to look like.. she was so beautiful!... They had used infra-red to give you an idea of in some lights what she would look like. At the time, Leonardo really was a genius.. but I never realised how much of a genius he was, and he would never know how idolised he would become.

'Where the spirit does not work with the wand, there is not art.'