Reimagining Visual Framing - Salvador Dali

You know, right before school started, during the summer of 09, someone had bought my mom a coffee table book as a gift. I can't remember the title or even what the cover looked like, but it was a large picture book containing the works of Salvador Dali. I would always flip through it when I was really bored, usually eating cereal, and thinking "What was this man smoking? How do you even start to imagine the concept of some of these paintings?" No, I didn't fall into an exploration of his paintings or even give it a second thought, but it's funny how right now, for homework, I get to spend some quality time with the main man Dali and dive, at least a smidgen, into his creative thought.

So check this out; we were given a few images from different artists as a starter log for our creative projects in my Media 203 class, and of course I've been really focusing on Dali's. I took this image from the group in particular...

What. The. Hell.

... because it's the most badass thing I've ever seen on canvas, and decided to crop out, or "Reframe" it into one particular section, (which could be a painting on its own, in my opinion) and ended up with this...

Again... wtf

... I used to think Salvador Dali was crazy, but looking at this 'reframe' we can clearly see the man's nuts. Okay but seriously, it's only a tiny portion of the insane world originally created, but it still holds some creative truths I'd like to explore.

First off, let's look at how Salvador makes use of depth cues in order to create this larger than life surreality in his paintings. From the original, we have a man in our most foreground, so we can imagine the size of the things going on around the portrait because we know how large a man should be, so we have a taste of distance judgment. We can't use the horse or elephants as reference points though, because even though we know the size of a normal horse and elephant, these aren't your average animals.

This is where Dali expresses his surreality best. If you take a close look, we can see other people deeper into the landscape. Two, maybe three other dudes freakin out waving more religious symbols. From that reference point, these elephants are just gigantic (and so awesome) and gives such a large power element to his work.

 This shot type is an extreme wide shot. He uses this wide scenario perspective to show the scale of the action and build intensity through the pure largeness of the animals.

Take another look at the rhythm of the painting, how you feel as you look from the left to the ride side of the canvas. You start small and weak, with a naked and malnourished man. Look at his arm, it's raised up at an angle towards the horse, but it's so significant his arm is raised on the right hand side, instead of mirrored, because as we read the picture from left to right, our vision steadily climbs upwards to the enormous surreal animals. A lot of power sits in the middle of the painting, where the animals touch the top of the canvas, and then slowly dies downwards towards the right side of the canvas. Wow.

Salvador Dali is not to be taken lightly, folks. Take another glance at his works and see what you can find out about this crazy man's creativity.