10 weeks, Post 7

On Monday we took an overnight road trip to St. Petersburg, FL, to visit the Dali Museum. I studied Spanish Civilization at UNI and love the work of Salvador Dali. This museum has been on my bucket list since our daughter visited it a few years ago.

Here are the flowers waking to the front entrance: poinsettias, hibiscus, and something right out of a surrealist Dali paining! 

Our docent was wearing a Dali sweater!

In "Daddy Long Legs of the Evening" she pointed out a prominent design in Dali’s paintings: the skull-like formation of a mountain near his home which mimics the shape of his own skull.

In "Profanation of the Host" we begin to see the layers and layers of images in Dali’s surrealist paintings and the double images.

As shown in "Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln" his wife Gala was the muse and model for numerous paintings. Here Dali was disproving a Scientific American article about the number of pixels needed for face recognition (256), but Dali did it in 150 as an homage to Mark Rothko’s color block style. At 20 meters (or if you squint) you can see the image of Abraham Lincoln.

 Even the architecture of the museum in artistic. Here is the helix staircase.

The geodesic windows overlooking the garden provide an unusual perspective.

Here’s the view from outside of that window.

Visitors are encouraged to take their own picture in front of a concave mirror.

In the garden you can stand inside Dali’s trademark mustache.

At the end of one exhibit you can stand inside a painting of clouds.

And you can even become a part of a Dali painting.

There was so much more, including a special exhibit of René Magritte and Dali. But I just want to share one last painting, my favorite of this museum. It is "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory". Dali was fascinated by atom theory and took his original "The Persistence of Memory" painting and deconstructed it into atomic particles.

Whenever I go to NYC and the Museum of Modern Art, I visit my all time favorite Dali painting "The Persistence of Memory".  Here it is from the MoMA website.

Dali painted ants in many of his paintings. Outside the museum are metal ant sculptures!

And since I'm a Master Gardener and take lots of photos of plants and animals, here are a few images as we exit the Dali museum.

 Bougainvillea...

...and a little lizard.