Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg FL

I had a moderately successful blog before called Sara Ivy (or SaraIvy.Org as I always wrote it). It's pretty much defunct now and the URL re-routes here. But I wanted to pull some of the blog posts from that blog and recycle them here (they will also be under the Recycled label). They are some of my favorite and some of my most viewed posts and this was one of them.



If you're leaving where you live the last thing you try to do is cram all your sight-seeing and friend visits into one day right? So I started last weekend. It was my friend Katelyn's birthday and she wanted to go to the newly remodeled Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg. I love Dali so this was perfect, I'd kill two birds with one stone.

You aren't allowed to take photographs inside the museum so I had to go online to find these but here are some of my favorite Salvador Dali Paintings:

Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940)

Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea, which at 20 meters becomes the portrait of Abraham Lincoln (1976)

The Persistence of Memory (1931)

And he didn't just do paintings. He made art installations and jewelry too. There's a pin that is the melting clocks from Persistence of Memory that I would die for!

I saw this at the museum and discovered next year's Halloween costume. No idea on if I'll wear pants yet ;) FYI - there are flies in all the shot glasses.

Katy Perry had a Banana as a phone and Juno had a hamburger phone but before them there was Salvador Dali's Lobster Phone. Talk about the sea calling...

I think one of the reason's Dali sticks with me is just how crazy he is as an artist. I mean, all artists whether you are a painter or a crafter or a musician or a writer, whatever your art may be, you have to be a little crazy. Think about it. Painters see things inside their head, writer's live lives that aren't their own inside their heads and musicians hear things in their heads. All of these people have to expel all these things that don't naturally occur to other people and then translate them into a tangible object or they'll go crazy. That's kind of my theory on how some people are given the OK to be crazy (like artists) and others, who can't expel these things or express their thoughts are crazy and it's not OK because they often scare people.

I just like eccentric people. I get them. I love reoccurring themes in artists works and I love that he was so into his wife but his wife basically ran him. Dali had no concept of money. He'd squander every commission he'd ever made. If it wasn't for Gala keeping him in check he never would have been able to live. Starving artist was all he would have amounted to. So yet again, behind another great man was a great woman. But he loved her enough to include her in his works, didn't care that she was basically a harlot (he supposedly encouraged her to sleep around because he was terrified of female genitalia and there is a theory that Dali was gay) and basically went insane when she died. Even though, she was apparently senile at the time and was the reason he couldn't paint in his old age because she basically drugged him so much that he shook. Kind of like Parkinson's only this was drug-induced. He died of heart failure but I say he was heart broken.

So if you want to know why I like him, know more about him than any other artist even though I don't really care for art? It's his story and lucky for those of us who are visual learners there are pictures!

 

Left to Right: April (Katelyn's Mom's GF), Katelyn's Mom, Katelyn's Sister Krista, Katelyn Also, Duckface was the only way mine would stay in my nose!

Just some instagram lovin

I said 'Ello

WHEN YOU WISH UPON A ...TREE?

EDITOR'S NOTE: This post was originally written and posted in 2012 (as indicated by the bracelet) just before I moved back to California. Admission for University of South Florida students and alumni are free with your USF ID, so I got in for free. If you're in the Tampa area I highly recommend going to see this and then to the Columbia restaurant for the best Cuban food of your life.