Admit it: You’ve owned a Dali poster of the melting clocks. And you know what? Dali was a master and a pioneer in the arts, so we’re cool. But that N*Sync poster is a different story.
In this So You Like: post, I’ve laid out a few other artists, from the Renaissance to contemporary painters, who share some of Dali’s characteristics. If you dig Dali, you might give them a look.
Dali’s Three Sphinxes of Bikini
Dali’s surrealism is easy to spot, with his penchant for taking advantage of pareidolia (basically making an object made of other objects – the head in the background of the above work made up of two trees) and his sweeping, painterly, dreamlike landscapes filled with scattered objects.
If you like Salvador Dali, you can hardly look past fellow surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. I bet if I showed you his painting Love Song (below) out of this context you’d have pinned it as Dali. I would have. Same strokes, same palette, same feeling that you might have come upon this in a dream.
He also makes good use of the similar landscape scenes.
How about someone a little more modern? Or rather, contemporary. Inka Essenhigh has a very similar painterly style: very smooth gradients, sort of tertiary colors. Some of her paintings are more narrative in composition, but some are of the more Dali-landscapes-strewn-with-items variety.
Minor Sea Gods of Maine
This Minor Sea Gods piece has hooked me.
Next up we’ve got Ann-Marie James, who is a bit of a stretch and I might just be folding her in here because I like her paintings. But they, again, have the same painterly style and an undeniable surrealism.
Affray
The Librarian
I first saw Archimboldo’s work sometime before four years of art history classes, and I thought his works of people created from objects (mostly food) must have been recently produced. I didn’t expect to see that type of humor in works from the 16th century. It surprised me to see him pop up later on, as sort of an art mystery. Was he a clever painter who loved riddles? Was he insane? NO ONE KNOWS. It seems that his ‘legit’ works disappeared long ago.
That should be enough for you today. Truth be told, there were a ton of artists I could have linked here, but maybe I’ll hold onto them for later on. For the next post I’m thinking of something on conceptual artists, unless I get some other interesting suggestions. Got one? Lay it out there! Obscure, silly, wildly popular; I’ll cover just about anything interesting.
