A comparison of two masterpieces from Salvador Dali

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Many of us visit art galleries and wonder what an artist is trying to tell us with his paintings or sculptures. It's never easy to interpret a piece of art as everyone sees it from their own perspective. Many of the master pieces of Salvador Dali have been replicated and volumes have been written about his artwork. Two of those will be compared and analyzed in this essay ; "Apparition of Face and Fruit- dish on a Beach" and "The Persistence of Memory". One is about the inseparable fate of humanity from nature the other is about memories that we create at every step and that come back to us and keep haunting us.
There are both similarities and differences in these masterpieces.
Both are about journey in life. In "The persistence of memory" Dali depicts a personal journey, where the melted clocks hanging on the totally bare single branch of the tree, or folded on the edge of the table or settled on a piece of cloth depict passage of time and the stillness of the past. It's all gone, it's almost lifeless, everything has melted away, underlining the pain that one feels when he or she tries to dig one's own past for answers but struggles to reconstruct the moment as it has faded away like the melted clocks. There are some very strong colors in that painting, dark brown, reddish orange, but also very peaceful colors like azure blue, creme and white. The dance of color is choreographed so carefully that one never gets tired of watching this painting. In the second piece "Apparition of Face and Fruit- dish on a Beach" he's trying to show how closely interrelated is the quality of our life to the quality of our nature. The painting presents a white and serene beach, with extremely peaceful colors of white, creme and shadows of b...

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...stiffness of time in the old ugly table, whereas in the second one, very little amount of dark colors have been used to show the garbage left behind on the white, creme dreamy sand line of the cost. Finally "Persisting memories" is about the journey of the individual whereas the "The apparition of face-fruit dish" is about the journey of humanity.

To conclude, both masterpieces provide a lot of food for thought and present an era of creativity that was accentuated with contrasting realities, one that is mindlessly racing forward, one that feels the urge to advance technically and become prosperous and rich just financially and another that's trying to put on the breaks and remind of the values that need to be preserved and passed on. In both paintings, one can see that torment, that urge to stop for a moment and reevaluate own life and collective journey in time.

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