Dali's Nature Morte Vivante

For my A2 Level artwork, I've have chosen to look into the theme: The Concept of Time and it's relevance to art. Having come up with a massive brainstorm full of ideas, I chose to start by looking at one relevant artist to my theme, and the first that came to mind was Salvador Dali due to his painting "The Persistence of Memory" because of his use of melting clocks.

Whilst looking into Dali's artistic life and taking a look at all his different paintings I came across his oil painting "Nature Morte Vivante", or also known as "Still Life, Fast Moving".



Nature Morte Vivante, oils on canvas, 1956



Dali's irony here is so brilliant. A still life in any other circumstance is meant to consist of 'still' objects. Time is supposedly not meant to exist within a still life painting, which results in there being no motion, because time is motion. Without time, motion does not exist. What Dali does here is take typical still life objects such as a bowl of fruit, but rather than painting them as motionless objects as expected, he gives each object motion which can be seen by either the way he has positioned the object (for example, the tipping of the glass) or by the lines behind the object which represent speed (such as the fruit). Dali completely defeats the idea of a still life painting in that respect.

Today, I think it is far easier to capture movement within art due to the use of photography and photoshop. We are able to take photographs that capture movement through blurs, whereas a painting purely created through the imagination is quite astonishing and I think this is what amazes me most about the painting.

 I was so fascinated by this piece and by the deep meaning behind it that I'm strongly considering basing my dissertation on the concept behind it. I think the idea of portraying movement within a painting is ironic and I like the idea of being able to add the concept of time into a painting.