Dali House

While a student at the San Fernando Academy, Dali lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes, then itself a prestigious cultural institution, an incubator for Spain’s brightest young thinkers, among them Dali’s new friends Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Bunuel.

At the same time, he submerged his natural shyness in flamboyance. He dressed as a dandy, with long hair and sideburns and stockings and knee breeches of a sort not seen in a century.

This is a self-portrait from 1921, the sketch above from 1922.

Dali’s mother died of breast cancer in February 1921 (”The greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her.”) and his father married her sister, of whom Salvador was quite fond. His father, seen below in a portrait by his son from that year, enrolled him at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he took his cues from Juan Gris, Georges Seurat and the Italian Metaphysical School and painted his first cubist works.

Here, Dali wrote in his diary in 1918: “I’ll be a genius. Perhaps I’ll be despised and misunderstood, but I’ll be a genius, a great genius.” “Self-Portrait in the Studio”, above, was done in 1919.

The original San Fernando Academy opened in 1752; its current facilities were inaugurated in 1986. It exhibits artworks spanning 200 years.

“I Am We” by James Sebor

Back to the Dali Planet series in a day or two. First, this just in …

James Sebor, who nods to Carl Jung’s theories of synchronicity and the collective unconscious, is among the artists whose work first caught my eye (hah HAH!) at a relatively new website full of surrealist art.

Meg Smith brought to my attention this truly extraordinary site, the beinArt International Surrealist Art Collective, which on your initial visits can be dumbfounding in its scope, as well as astonishing in its content.

Australian Jon Beinart put the massive and smoothly designed site online last year, and it has a catalogue of more than 250 artists with pop-up examples of their work, plus a blog, shop and many links, including one to a busy forum to which loads of people submit their own surrealist art. The examples here are copyrighted, but I hope the collective won’t mind.

As well as promoting all of the artists through the Web, the collective is compiling a physical collection of works with the intent of putting it on tour and eventually opening its own gallery, and Jon has established beinArt Publishing, which has books and magazines in mind. The first publication is Metamorphosis, now on sale at the site, and it features Ernst Fuchs, James Sebor and Martins de Barros, who painted “Le Philosophe”, seen here.

The beinArt Surreal Art News Blog has illustrated articles on surreal art “oddities”, “strange art and artists”, exhibitions, publications, animation and art history, along with reviews, interviews and YouTube videos.

Finally, Jon has launched the International Surreal, Fantastic Realism & Visionary Art Forum, into which all kinds of random creativity pours from keen fans, and the work can range from “lowbrow art” to the mystical and esoteric.

Jon Beinart himself is the discoverer of toddlerpedes, a crazy species that make you jump until you realise they’re doll sculptures, and then you jump again. Apart from nailing together a global community of like-minded inventors and explorers, he’s into “obsessive-compulsive drawings”. Nothing to be afraid of, though.