The Persistence of Memory

         

My class was set a task in which we had to all find a piece of art work each that we all found interesting so that we could write a critique about it. I chose to look at Salvador Dali’s piece of work ‘The Persistence of Memory’. The reason I have chose to look at this piece of work is because I like the look of Surrealist pieces of work. The reason why I find them interesting is because of how the artists express their imaginations and how free the work is to the conscious control of reason and convention and how it has inherited theories such as Sigmund Freud’s model of the subconscious. Artist’s that work with Surrealism aim to capture the experience of a dream, they do this because dreams often play out unexplainable situations with unrelated people, Things and places. The clocks in this painting also represent how time in dreams is warped because they feel like they last longer than what they actually do in reality.   

In addition to this the reason that I like this piece of work is because I like how Salvador Dali has taken clocks and made them appear as if they are melting away which could represent how time slips away from us all and how we cannot control it. However time is a concept that has been created by us all, no other spices on our planet lives their lives concerned about the time of day and deadlines. Furthermore the scene of this painting seems to be set in a wasteland or desert which could symbolize how lost people would feel if we were made to live without the concept of time without having an idea what day, month or year it was, Its hard to even imagine a world without time when you constantly are reminded what time of day it is and time with objects around the world such as clocks, mobile phones and even daily news papers.