Art History Comparison of Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali and Research Paper

Art History Comparison of Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali and Better Homes, Better Gardens by Kerry James Marshall - Research Paper Example For many artists, the inspiration for their works stems from the things that they know or have experience with.   Salvador Dali included the cliffs of his beloved Catalan Coast in many of his paintings, including his most notorious â€Å"Persistence of Memory†, not only because they were a landscape feature he was intimately familiar with, but also because they helped to represent the duality of meaning he wished to convey in his artwork.   In a similar way, the African-American artist Kerry James Marshall has worked to include his own experience and background into his paintings in such a way that they work to provide a meaningful background to his subjects, adding subtleties of meaning to the overall work that helps to portray his idea of what the painting is attempting to say.  In both works of art, the background plays a large role in establishing the meaning of the work. Although the Catalan cliffs might not have the same impact on an uninformed viewer than they wou ld have on someone who is intimately familiar with the changing faces of these cliffs as the sunlight plays across their face, they nevertheless add a nuance of meaning to â€Å"Persistence of Memory† that might otherwise be lost, especially for individuals who have seen them first-hand or know anything about the background of the artist. For Dali, the cliffs of the background represented the physical equivalent of his â€Å"principle of paranoiac metamorphosis.† Dali is quoted as saying â€Å"All the images capable of being suggested by the complexity of their innumerable irregularities appear successively and by turn as you change your position. This was so objectifiable that the fishermen of the region had since time immemorial baptized each of these imposing conglomerations – the camel, the eagle, the anvil, the monk, the dead woman, the lion’s head. [†¦] I discovered in this perpetual disguise the profound meaning of that modesty of nature whic h Heraclitus referred to in his enigmatic phrase ‘Nature likes to conceal herself.’† (Descharnes & Neret 1994 p. 171).