Salvador Dali (Woman sleeping in a landscape)
Description
The painting is done in a surrealist style. Dali’s painting of ‘Woman sleeping
on a landscape’ is executed on canvas with oil paints. It is a very dark and
gruesome work. The desert scene is represented by a really dark colour
scheme. The sky is blue, suggesting daytime, but the desert sand is black.
The black sand extends to the horizon. The nature scene of this picture is
very eerie, giving off a strong sense of emptiness. There seem to be some
rocks scattered in the horizon. One of the bigger ones is protruding from the
sand, representative of a tombstone. The title of the painting is a play on
words because the woman is obviously deceased and has been for a long
time, as her head and right side have started to decay. When we look at the
openings on the woman’s body closer, we can notice that those are shells
inside of her body. It is a very bizarre and morbid scene, we can notice that
a tree branch or a stick is emerged from the right side and the woman’s
right arm is tied to this object with some sort of rope. This section reminds
me of a child poking a dead insect with a stick. The woman’s body is cut off
the painting at the hips on the right side, leaving the rest of the picture to
our imagination. The main object of this painting (the woman) is focused on
the right side of the canvas, her right arm is tied to the stick, she faces her
back to us but her right side is the one that we see; so much right in such a
sad landscape. It is also interesting to note that though the woman is naked,
all we see is her boney back. Everything is dead: the woman, the stick, the
desert. Everything in this landscape has been reduced to nothing. The
woman’s body is so carelessly thrown in the desert, as if it doesn’t deserve
any respect of a proper burial. Could the woman be dreaming of her own
death? May be she suffers from depression and tortures herself in her
sleep, or that she thinks very low of herself, she could be feeling empty and
tied down. The whole idea behind the painting screams pain.
Representation
The objects in this painting: the woman, the stick, the rocks, all bear
realistic presentations of their real-life counterparts. The proportions of the
woman’s body are true to the normal dimensions of a woman’s body. The
stick, rocks and rope have all been painted very meticulously and find true
presentation of the ideas. The observer is first drawn to the golden soft
strokes of the woman lying on the right side of the canvas; an image that
sticks out of the darkness consumed by most of the space on the canvas.
The desert landscape has been obviously conveyed through empty space
and a few rocks speckled in the horizon. The artist has portrayed a soft, yet
cold and empty blue sky.
Expression
Although the painting is named ‘Woman Sleeping in the Horizon’, Dali has
managed to convey a very dark and depressing picture because the
woman seems dead due to the hole in her head and on her right side.
Perhaps Dali is showing us a window of what the woman is dreaming about
as she is asleep, hence the seashells inside her body when you take a
closer look. She could be dreaming of the sea. Dali is expressing dark
thoughts also by conveying a black desert. Dark, heavy colours have been
used around the woman’s body, yet her body provides some type of
warmth due to the golden tones in her hair and on her skin. However, the
texture is soft and smooth which sort of sets you off to a distant
atmosphere. Dali’s painting makes the observer feel as if they have almost
stepped into a vast, open and dark desert.
Decoration
The seashells inside the woman make the painting a bit lighter on the soul,
representing faraway vision of the ideal place in the woman’s eyes.
However, they have been placed there quite cunningly to represent internal
tissue that has decayed. This could be representative of a subliminal
message – our dreams are dead, corroded. The small stones on her right
side could be representative of being broken, perhaps by the actions of
others, yet they also look like decaying flesh from a distance. Not much
decoration is present in this painting.
Construction
The horizontal space of this painting has been divided into quarters; one
quarter pertaining to the blue sky and three quarters pertaining to the black
desert sand. The rock representative of a tombstone is carefully placed
almost in the centre of the horizon, while the woman’s body is laid to the
right of the landscape. Dali has used perspective to make the objects
appear more realistic by making some appear close and some far away.
He has used soft, smooth brush strokes on the woman, symbolising the
delicateness of a female.
Fantasy
This painting lies on the reverse side of reason, as the woman is most
probably dreaming because she cannot be dead as the title of this painting
has created ambivalence about the possibilities represented here. One
interesting thought to dwell upon is the possibility of this being a seaside,
not a desert. The seashells inside the woman’s head could possibly
suggest that she is a mermaid, washed ashore and being tied to a stick like
a puppet, to play on the fantasy of what she is to all of mankind. The
absence of the lower half of her body allows our minds to explore
numerous possibilities of what could be.