This painting can be found in The Museum of Modern Art. It was painted in 1931 by Salvador Dali.
The reason I chose this painting to talk about was because I knew the name of it before I went to the Museum of Modern Art. Because I’m not a very artsy person, and I can normally never identify a piece of art, I thought it was amazing that I actually recognized and knew the name of a painting in one of the museums we had to go to without looking at the cheat sheet next to it.
This is a video that reconstructs Salvador Dali’s painting and identifies every important piece of the painting piece by piece so people don’t miss anything. I found it quite interesting and thought everyone else might too:
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I didn’t interpret this painting quite the same way that the video does, but I liked the way that the video breaks everything up.
The first thing that popped out to me about this painting was the melting clocks. So, I figured that the painting had a lot to do with time. Then I looked around the painting a little more to get a better understanding of why there were melting clocks. I found the ants all over the one clock and I immediately thought of a piece of water melon i was eating in the summer. I left one piece of water melon on the table because I was playing sports with my cousins. When I came back around 3 hours later, there was only 4/5 of a water melon left. Why? Because a bunch of ants ate it. I connected this vision immediately with the painting and began to develop a better conclusion of its meaning than “it’s a painting of melting clocks.” At that point, I thought the painting was about deterioration, and how over time things deteriorate, but I wasn’t quite at a conclusion I was satisfied with.
The next thing I saw was something that looked like an animal on the ground. The weird thing about that “thing that looked like an animal” was that I couldn’t tell if it was an animal. It was hard to tell what it was, but the general outline of the thing looked like the general outline of an animal, so i concluded that that’s what it was. It was a dying animal. It seemed to me like Salavador Dali was creating a sort of blurred vision of an animal, and when I realized this, I came up with an interpretation of the painting that I was content with.
I think Salvador Dali’s message was that over time, our memories melt away, just like the clocks in his painting. That’s clearly represented by the melting clocks. Our memories become fuzzier and fuzzier as every day goes by. I feel like the thing that looked like an animal represented every animal anyone’s every loved, whether it be another human being or a person. Since we tend to outlive our animals and some of our loved ones, we witness their deaths. It is apparent that after a while, we forget things about these people and these animals. Without visual aid, we forget what they look like. We forget their voice. We forget their personality. We forget bits and pieces of them that our memory is not strong enough to hold. After knowing my dog, Missy, for 8 years or so, she ran away from home. After the first day, it seemed like i could never forget anything about her because I loved her so much. I missed her every day and I always thought about her, but after a while, I couldn’t remember what she looked like. I couldn’t remember a lot of things about her. Then eventually, all that was left of her in my memories was her name, and that’s all I could remember. It’s sad when you think about it. It’s like there are little ants inside our brains eating our memories little by little so that only a fraction of them are left after each meal. I for one think that’s a scary concept.
