Artist Appropration
I wanted to appropriate Salvador Dali's work because I was interested in not only the surreal aspects of his paintings, but also because of the strong concepts behind each one. In Salvador Dali's original "The Persistence of Memory" I felt the concept of time. Time is linear and so everything has a beginning and everything has an end. I felt this strong concept of the end of time and the struggle to make moments stand still. For me the idea behind the melting clocks and the title is that at the end of our lives we struggle to keep our identity. If you don't believe in any type of religion then at one moment you are on this earth and at the next you vanish completely. I felt this strong concept of reaching our own end and how time is coming to an end. Our memories wither or "melt" away and this process can be slowed by the struggle to fight. This also reminds me of Dylan Thomas' poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night".
Not only did I want to appropriate this painting, but I wanted to go beyond it. This painting is somewhat like a dream and so I wanted to enter this dream world and see what other landscapes there could be. My work takes the concepts behind Dali's and somewhat switches into a 180 direction. Where his used to warm and desert like landscape I chose a forest that is thriving with life. My concept is that life is just beginning and it will only keep going. There is no reason to fight to keep your identity because the work is thriving. There is no persistence, there is indifference. Life is thriving like the forest and memories will hold strong with youth. My work takes the familiar landscape of Dali's and returns it to what it could have been or what Dali could have painted. My work shows another aspect to this dream world that means time will keep moving forward.
-JP Amador
No comments:
Post a Comment