ABOVE:Dougie’s sketchbook – Isle sur la Sorgue, Avignon 1989. Left: Life-size bronze by Cor Zitman. Right: Diana Vierny – from a drawing by Matisse.

¡DALI IS NOT CRAZY!

A close friend, with a lifelong dedication to music, agreed enthusiastically with my suggestion that ‘creative people live constantly on the edge of fantasy most of their lives’ and that an inborn ability to imagine the ‘what might be’ sets them apart from those who think using the other side of the brain.

Often misunderstood, creatives can be underrated by those who work only with known facts or figures that must tally to reach a conclusion. I defy the average accountant to begin to envision the unknown. Presently obvious as Creative and Art programmes are being culled in our Polytechnics.

Please understand that I write these musings purely from my own life experience and art background. Artwork is many things and, as a figurative artist of over 65 years with a brush, pencil, or piece of conté, I appreciate a sensitive line from other artists. I was a professional creative in the 60s, employed on a broad range of applied art and media projects. In Kelvin Grove Museum of Art Glasgow last year, I was attracted to Salvador Dali’s ‘Christ of St John on the Cross’ so it seems appropriate as I write, to be listening in my head, to the poems of Dali’s friend Federico Garcia Lorca set to music sung by Paco Ibanez. I am reliving night driving years ago between Provincia de Madrid, Zaragoza to Barcelona, often problem solving as the miles sped by. So it is with this piece, between Whangarei and Hellensville, stopping and writing, using my iPad Pro.

Quite how we almost unconsciously fill a canvas with a comfortable mosaic of shapes, colours, and forms can be amazing – especially to ourselves, the creators. It flows from our hand to often surprise ourselves next day. Where does this imagery come from? Is it, as suggested, that we with creative minds use the opposite side of our brain? The last person to know how I am painting is myself. We simply know or feel when a brush stroke is right – worse, we know when it’s wrong.  It’s all about making decisions. Creativity can take many forms.

Observed in a restaurant cafe in Madrid where poets and writers gather for afternoon discussion – El Cajón, ‘the drawer’, a small group of avant-garde retired well-dressed men were in the process of creating a new word. A word that summed up the personality of their friend, while sipping lemon tea in ornate silver handled glasses. They were about to create a totally new sound to honour him on his birthday.

A word that would describe his talent or character – forever. I rather like that idea.

Each colour has a wavelength, also an associated sound, pitch and frequency. I wonder how paintings vary one to another as electronic graphic sound images. I have had a problem since 1960 to paint an experience remembered high above a small town in a valley, on a winding hill road near Coin in southern Spain. We were photographing a fashion model in a long evening gown in a Modigliani-like composition. My very first assignment from a London winter to almond blossom and orange groves. In the valley below a bell started to chime and the laughter of children came up – how do I paint that sound of laughing happy children coming out of school? Marc Chagall would know – I still ponder.

How can we draw sound?  If you were to draw the sound of a voice as a continuous line, what would that graphic line look like? Would it have colour, go up and down, curve or have sharp angles, even change colour at times? Try it with a friend; you may find yourself bordering on an abstract portrait. Creativity is all about breaking rules, but you must understand the rules you are breaking. Creativity is many things and has many directions we all experience daily.

Where do words come from? ‘Surrealism’ is one such created word birthed out of necessity in 1924 Paris, created by André Breton and others. Catalan Salvador Dalí had one such creative mind, backed by superb virtuoso skill to create imagery that demanded this special word to describe the work and subsequent art movement. Fired by Freud’s interest in dreams and the bizarre it fed their imagination to separate them away from the conventional ‘warm snug’ to be aware exciting flamboyant thinkers. A line in a favourite C S Lewis poem of mine, named ‘The Country of the Blind’, describes those with little awareness. It was in a small, treasured book I bought at the University bookshop in Barcelona in 1968, while unusually waiting for a bus to go to my Playa Castel de Fels home. I knew nothing of Lewis’s children’s stories. Later, lines from his poetry named many of my paintings.  “Goddess country, never men’s, a mountain mass stood bold to the inward eye” etc. All wonderful turns of phrase. He said he found God on his way from Oxford to Whipsnade Zoo which passed our home on the Chiltern Hundreds.

I was privileged to experience the interior of a Spain still locked in the 17th century. In contrast to Madrid, I feel Cataluña has a plus like Paris, with high fashion, good taste and a mix of avant-garde people who naturally expound their superior appreciation for culture, design and their claim to classic Greek origins. Interestingly, Catholic Opus Dei often at the financial helm. I never worked so hard or had such a fabulous studio office space; it made London or New York look shabby.

I have a theory that because of the Catholic church, the dragging of chains shackled to a leg while on hands and knees following the Virgin’s journey, that another Catalan – Antonio Gaudi – as a child saw these same chains stored for San Isidro hanging high on the outside walls of churches and realised the significant strengths of a loop of chain. He inverted the loop as an arch and appreciated the natural distribution of perfect forces within that arch. Interestingly, the chain arch could be varied in height or width, yet still retain the same perfect distribution for the architect; a realisation not arrived as a mathematical equation, but through a visual graphic. Thank you, San Isidro, the church, and painfully raw women’s ankles.

Gaudi, the Prado, Escorial, Madrid, the Spanish painting school were the influences on the young genius Salvador Dali who at art school considered that none of his tutors could critique his work. But what would you expect from a young man with a name like Salvador? A lonely and likely insecure child after his mother’s death, he came from a line of Salvador’s, including his dominating father and even his same named elder brother. Forced to be a fighter, he knew his destiny in his name.

Although shy, his name, I believe, gave him the confidence to be first ‘himself’ – what flare, what presence did he command as a man? The Spanish have a word for such people, they say “¡He has Gracia!”  Impossible to truly translate in English as it is much more than ‘grace’. A possible explanation, I was told, might be that when this person enters a room of people, everyone becomes aware they have arrived, even if not seen.  Something has changed, by their presence.

Mitchener’s explanation of another unique Spanish expression ‘Vivo Yo’ is best; a graphic of a smiling little boy, happily peeing the words ‘Vivo Yo’ (I live!) in the snow. It means rather more than merely ‘I live’. ‘Guapa’ is a complementary term to a female, young or old. The use of the word ‘Guapa’ a complementary term to a female, young or old, again in the ‘familiar’, that may be accepted with pride, respect or affection by an aged woman or little girl alike – all equally.  The compliment is totally different in meaning according to age or standing – you are ‘more woman’, with no insult of being overly familiar, or ‘fresh’.

Few have Gracia. It can’t be expected, demanded, bought or even earned; it exists as a presence, honoured mutually by collective awareness of others. Dalí understood these differences, peculiar to his people and if we try to understand the man and his work we must attempt to understand his times, attitude and culture.

He automatically built himself into the imagery with all his loves and hates. “Do I address this person as Tú or as Usted?” – the familiar ‘Tú’ (you) is only with family or close friends. ‘Usted’ is for people you don’t know but are talking to. Use the ‘familiar’ as an over friendly Kiwi and you are dead in the water.

All these unusual attitudes and references to us, exist in the hand and the mind behind those wild open eyes and the long-curved mustache I feel confirmed his Toro fighting horns, so deadly to the Torero. Dalí the fighting bull to be feared. He imagined he could disembowel you with a flick of his head, I am sure. Did Philip IV inspire Dali with the painting of him hunting wild boar?

We employed two dynamic Portuguese and Spanish bull fighter executives who would enter the conference room with the same look and attack. Antonio later naturally became top man from New York to Buenos Aires. Bullfighting is not a sport – it is a religion and happens only on religious days.  Likewise, if you wish to begin to understand Picasso, first attend a bullfight with a reliable and knowledgeable companion who will take you to the mortuary below and explain the ritual and, at times, bullfighters’ deaths that so inspired Pablo all his life. This is so evident in his attack, content and the drawing of his art. I made my unwilling students sit out a bullfight. “Leave by all means”, I said, “but never critique Picasso. You must understand the man and try to know what drives him”.

Dalí the showman played out his overt surreal self-honesty to the amazement of his audience, present or not. Diderot would have been proud of him, I believe. (See Issue no 15 of the NZ Artist Magazine). Some, meanwhile, in ignorance perhaps, are simply delighted with the imagery, colour and composition of the Dalínian world. A piano hoisted high in a tree, fried egg watches, Mae West’s lips sofa, or long-legged elephants and clusters of insects in secret places. Catalans, intensely proud of their man who astounds the world, maybe even the Catholic church, although he overtly refers to sexuality. I received memos in 1968 to make Warners glamorous underwear advertisements, not sexy. Manufactured under licence via an Opus Dei factory in Sabadel, and yet Dalí was acceptable to be blatantly sexually overt.

Likewise, I wonder why Dalí said he believed in Generalissimo Franco, a mystery to me. Was this a Surreal statement in itself? When Andy Warhol, who Dali did not especially rate as an artist, gave him a silkscreen process print, Dalí placed it on the floor, unzipped, and like the little boy in the snow, peed on it in the hotel bar. Did he also pee a crucial word I wonder? Or was it his sign of taking ownership?

We will never know, but for me the philosophy fits. Dali was not crazy – he was simply very different by doing and being the opposite of what one might expect. He lived on the edge of fantasies that would terrify others, maybe even himself. He, like a Jesuit, mentally flogged himself, even in his relationship with Gala his wife. He had to write for permission to visit her in her Castell Pera in Puból. However, his big fear was death – but again the church runs deep here. Are we all not confined by our upbringing?

In 1986 my Whangarei students camped overnight in Cadaqués. We often lunched clients years ago, so I know this small fishing town well. Adult Kiwi students never previously abroad, en route via the New York Museum of Modern Art to see Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’, had stayed with Swiss photographer friends Rene and Rita Groebli in Fontaine de Vaucluse. They saw previously unseen works of Henri Matisse in Isle sur de la Sogue, sat in Van Gogh’s olive grove experiencing the Mistral at St Remy, and the Vasarely Foundation in Gordes – now, Cadaqués – home of both Dali and Picasso. They breakfasted on the smell of olives and orange blossom, were amazed with Figueres and the Dalí Foundation, for lunch. One must feel the sun, sip the wine, smell the garlic sizzling on the plancha as ‘pan con tomate’, cheap peasant toasted bread rubbed with garlic, olive oil, tomatoes and salt fill the mouth and comforts the soul, between sips of Rioja.

That loaves of bread balanced on the heads of Dalí statues watch us from high, are reminders that after battle, the first thing to do was to get the bread ovens going and feed the survivors. Dalí knew all about 1936 and the Civil War.

Dalí and Russian Gala were each their own great loves. A surreal relationship. You must research for yourselves their sexuality behind the superb hand and eye that, with a piercing gaze of her, or any subject, realised the same skill of Velázquez, Zurbaran and Goya. Dalí’s overt surreal imagery is astounding to me having emerged from within a Jesuit domain, but not to be discussed here as we have a broad younger readership. Francis Bacon, likewise, but to name one other.  Art is generated by many forces, interesting but not always understood, as Balthus stated on film.

‘Surrealism’, an invented word to describe dream-like events, actions, imagery of both performance and artwork, came from a small group of creatives in 1920s Paris. When reading other accounts please remember that writers’ opinions are only ‘their’ opinions, they often differ; much is conjecture.

I suggest you must best experience the works, their size, their dynamic force to form your own opinion. Pictures in books give no size dynamic, photos vary in colour from one publication to another – you need to experience the works yourself. I am sure I would be a pain in the neck to untraveled tutors should I survive to attend discussion lectures.

! Dalí is not crazy! What did he mean when he spontaneously said that on film?

Best answered perhaps by a personal tale: I complained to my doctor that I thought I was getting neurotic and paranoiac. An art collector herself, she faced me, took my hands and looked into my eyes and said, “Dougie if you weren’t, you would not be any good.”

Push the boundaries, friends, live on the edge.