I’m a dreamer. I mean a dreamer as in someone who dreams every night…

The content in my dreams could be something directly reflecting my daily life or something totally out of the blue, something freaky. Since dreaming every night has become a part of my life, I am naturally intrigued by paintings and artworks that are “dream-like” and “surreal”. So, when I first learned about Salvador Dali and his paintings, I was immediately fascinated by all the symbols, objects, and weird creatures he painted in his paintings. There are many surrealist artists like him, but Dali is one of the few who is able to convince viewers that other worlds could also be real. Here, I would like to share one of my favorite Dali­ paintings, The Three Ages, 1940.

In this painting, Dali­ expresses the three stages in a person’s life: Old Age, Adolescence and Infancy. At first glance, you can clearly see two faces in the painting; however, when you move closer and look at the details, you can see the faces are actually constructed by other objects and create another small face on the right. This is Dali’s famous double imagery technique. To Dali, he may have been trying to directly express how these elements had a great effect on him, and were central to his being. To me, the painting reflects how we can see and read every individual and every single thing from different perspectives.

It’s like doing design, when someone asks you to create a square. By looking at the square from different angles and different dimensions, you will be able to create something that is more interesting and different from most people’s impression on a simple square. I believe Dali’s abilities to see things from a different and unique point of view might be the key to why he was one the most successful surrealist artists back then.