How he became an artist

 Dali was a Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer. After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he joined the Surrealists in 1929 and his talent for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. He took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method which he named `critical paranoia'. According to this theory one should cultivate genuine delusion as in clinical paranoia while remaining residually aware at the back of one's mind that the control of the reason and will has been deliberately suspended. He claimed that this method should be used not only in artistic and poetical creation but also in the affairs of daily life. His paintings employed a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal `dream' space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory characters of his imagery. He described his pictures as `hand-painted dream photographs' and had certain favorite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax.

In the next few years Dali started to paint less and spent more time developing his method. He read a lot about Freud’s ideas, and he found a new inspiration. He sought to explore the unconscious mind. He was very fascinated with the state of semi-consciousness and the mental state between consciousness and unconsciousness state of mind. This state is when the mind is free from the restraints of logic or social regulations. Instead of analyzing the state of mind for psychiatric reasons like Freud did, Dali just wanted to explore it and find a way to incorporate it into his art. After awhile he started to get tired of it so he drifted away from surrealism and returned to the classical form of art in 1936. He began to experiment with several different types of art. Some of them were Classical Spanish, Classical Italian and pompier.