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Showing posts with the label surrealist

The Painting The Son of Man by Rene Magritte

The Son of Man -1964 The Son of Man (1964) was painted by Rene Magritte as a method of depicting the real and hidden about human nature. The picture shows an apple covering a man’s face with his eyes sticking out over the apple watching the world. The left arm of the man bends backwards from the elbow creating an unnatural body position. The sea in the back and the half height wall all help to draw attention to the absurd. The picture being absurd only because we cannot understand what the purpose is of something so blatantly in front of us and designed to block our complete understanding. The picture draws us to try and see the face so that we can recognize who it is even though it has been confirmed to by the author to be a self-portrait.   The apple being an apparent distortion of that recognition that creates a level of frustration and conflict for the viewer. There is almost a desire to knock the apple away to see who it is that is peering out over the top. This frustr

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

The Persistence of Memory 1931 The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali in 1931 represents a surrealist perspective of deep understandings of the nature of the universe. The painting is more than meets the eye and much deeper than its first impression. Even though the work was started from watching melting cheese it is also a deeply moving unconscious experience. The painter and his work were part of a movement that delved beneath the human psyche and tried to project that understanding for others to ponder the complex nature of human experience.  The melting watches were representations of the continuum of space and time and the melting cosmic order. Time is relative to activity in the environment. If everything within the environment is moving fast while the object is moving slow, time will seeming slower than if an object speeds up and the environment lags in speed, then time is condensed. The creature in the picture represents the fading of images in dreams that we h