One of the things that really blew my mind when I first saw Dali’s work in person was the scale of the paintings.
It one thing to look at a plate in a book on art, but when you stand before a painting in a gallery it’s a totally different experience. It’s like the painting is suddenly a real thing and not just something left over in your imagination like fragments of a dream. When you are looking at a photograph of a painting in a book you subconsciously imagine the size of the painting (at least I do). And even though there is usually a size under the image, I still had all of these predetermined dimensions in my head. So, when I saw my first Dali paintings I discovered some that I had imagined were a couple feet wide were actually inches across, and others like The Hallucinogenic Toreador were up to 13 feet tall.
I’ve met my share of people who are disgusted by Dali, but I believe the man was a genius. Everything he did was on a grand scale – from the seemingly minuscule where he used a small brush with all but a couple