Salvador Dali, surrealist color master

Returning to my influences (which I haven't blogged on in a while!) Salvador Dali is one of the first artists I can remember really loving. I think I was about five or six when I saw "Persistence of Memory" - the melting clocks - and remember falling instantly in love. I have so many pencil-on-notebook paper drawings of things melting over the backs of chairs and table and whatever from grade school that I could probably make a nice softcover out of them. Back then I didn't really understand many of his subtexts - I just loved how the stuff he painted looked and the "weirdness" of it all.

Even today I'm entranced by his soft, smooth shapes and lines, and brilliant colors. And more than a little in love with the surrealist vision where nothing is as it seems and everything has a subtext - even if the subtexts get a little too Freudian. There are so many lessons in Dali paintings for the graphic designer... composition, movement, shape, line, color, and the element of making something more than its face value.