The Dali

I had no idea there was a whole Salvador Dali Florida thing until our friends Darrick and Nancy came back from visiting their folks and told us about the museum where a couple had collected his work for four decades. Moving even more south we have come to visit Darricks parents and also our friends Tony and Dan. Stagg has known them most of his life and it was such a fun feeling when they said stop on by and spend some time. The St. Petersberg museum has some amazing paintings and work by Dali, but the very best and at least my favourite were about six huge paintings of Dali's done in the 60's. These works are really something and I hope I can explain why they were so cool. In many ways Dali got into exploring the unconscious and dreams and the narratives in his paintings were surrealistic in order to reject the contemporary paintings at that time. And then he began exploring more traditional subjects and images in the 50's because he didn't agree with the images or perhaps goals/concerns of the abstract expressionisits. He felt they were existentialist or negative and he felt he wanted to find positivity or reconciliation with traditions in image-making and moral or spiritual truth. Then there is one specific painting that makes a lot of fun with pixilated images...and he does a portrait of Abraham Lincoln pixilated, with Jesus and Gala in it...and ity's a homage to Rothko. I was just treally amazed by these three phases of interests and struggles his work went through and the Lincoln homamage to Rothko seemed so beautiful a resolution in some ways. It's partly a hideous painting and partly beautiful...to me this represented the struggle of the content. It seemed to contain a small history of Dalis own perceptions and response for his place in history.


Stagg and Tony heading to the waterfront by museum.







Our extrodinary hosts.