Dali's 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship

It's here! Oh frabjous day! Calloo! Callay! He chortled in his joy.

Yes, Dali's 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship were just handed to me by the kind US Postman delivering Amazon's box o'goodies for me, including ART & FEAR: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) Of Artmaking, by David Bayles & Ted Orland.



Also arriving today was THE VIEW FROM THE STUDIO DOOR: How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World, by Ted Orland, one of the two authors of ART & FEAR. I have never read it, but I liked Orland's efforts on ART & FEAR, so I figured I'd give him a shot with his followup work.

ART & FEAR was a book I owned before, loaned out during the Great Sleep when my artistic side was encouraged to give up and let me be 'normal' with a 'real career'. Alas, like many great books, the loan never returned. But I'm not sad... it means that the word is getting out, and I've got a new copy of my own.

Back to Dali

My old Spanish Professor, Vilma Manzotti, PhD, at the State University of New York at Potsdam College, once chided her class of American students gently about the fact that we knew nothing about how to read a book. All books need to be read starting from the front cover, because there is vital information being missed. The Table of Contents sets out the outline of the work and helps put the reader in the right frame of mind. Dedications can be important, too, sometimes. And Forewords and Prologues all matter, because if they didn't they wouldn't be in the book.

So, with a nod to the wisdom of Vilma, I began at the front cover. Artwork by Dali himself. Pen & ink, thick and bold and fine and scratchy. An angelic figure behind a canvas where an artist is working, other "figures" or vaguely anthropomorphic ink swathes, stand about in various poses. Interesting to me is that the Angel figure, what I interpret as the Muse, is not looking at the painter or the painting, but is instead turning aside and reading a book.

Ahhh, Dali, your sin was that you knew your own greatness.

Inside the front cover we find a color plate of "Portrait of the Back of My Wife Contemplating Architectural Form". Fitting that Gala should make a very early appearance. Another page in we find another pen & ink drawing, "Port Lligat Madonna Help Me", then the Title page where I find that this is a translation.

Ah hah. You know how I said that art seemed now to be gathering to itself all of the component bits of my somewhat disjointed life? I was in Vilma Manzotti's classes for a reason, that being my undergraduate degree is in Spanish Literature. I'll read this through first in English, for the purposes of making an approach to Dali's writings, but I will have to secure a copy for myself in its original Spanish. Luckily, I am fluent in Spanish, and luckily still, I've had great philosophical discussions and dialogues with other academics and my professors about how translations must make a choice... either they have to be true to the literal words and translate as exactly as possible (a very scholarly approach), or else they have to translate the meaning of the text itself and sacrifice the exact language used (a very artistic approach). The best translators can use a little of both, but in every case, whenever you translate something you are completely dependent upon the lens of the translator to make the right choices, to be able to identify and see what is truly important to the text, to the author, and to the potential readers.

Best to always read it in the original language. Which is something the prophet Mohammed knew, and knew well, for he lay down the edict that the Q'ran must only be read or studied in the original language it was written in. Today, we call that Ancient Arabic, and student of the Q'ran must learn how to read it fluently. I'm willking to bet that Dali toyed with the idea, or would have agreed with it philosophically. I never met the man; more's the pity, but if I had to choose between meeting Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali, I would choose Dali (although I know I might well have been disappointed by the interview, if he would have said more than 2 words to me at all).

Reading On

I do see that there are notes in the edition which tell us that the Dover edition has been slightly altered from the original... Gala's painting was not originally on the inside cover. My print production background tells me that it was cheaper to print the color pieces on the covers instead of putting a signature of color in the middle of the book, so this makes sense.

The other thing they mention is that in the original, Dali's name appeared without any accents, just as I've been writing it for fear of losing the accent in translation across ASCII and Unicode browsers. They put all of the accents in when they reprinted it from the original. Dalí. Interesting that in Dali's own time they didn't put the accents in... I'm not sure if this was an oversight or a preference of Dali's. More research would be needed, but I'm working on other things.

Dedication

Dedication follows, where Dali describes what he wanted at each of the decades of his life, and how things have grown. He also describes his mission "Now at forty-five" as being to paint a masterpiece so that he can save Modern Art from chaos and laziness. He swears he will succeed.

It's an interesting thing, really. Dali is known and talked about as a man of tremendous arrogance and ego. I'm not so certain it's completely undeserved, and that must be difficult to live with when you just want to wipe the smirk off of the man's moustachioed face.

Then follows a list of all of the 50 secrets with their titles, numbers, and page references. It begins with "1. The secret of the five different movements of the five types of brushes." and it ends with "50. The secret of the angel." Now, oddly enough, my mind is immediately drawn back to the front cover. I want to get to 50 because I suspect that he's alluding to the angel on the cover.

In skimming through the secrets, I see lots of references to weird and obscure things. Some of them jump out at me, though. Like this one. "19. The secret of learning to paint before knowing how to draw." Well, if the title alone is indicative (I highly doubt it's the whole shebang) then this one speaks directly to me. I don't yet consider that I know how to draw. Yet it's heartening to see that this might actually be a good thing, at least according to Dali.

Prologue and Quintessence

Stray comments about Dali having been at least passingly familiar with the occult from Guru Dave begin to draw attention to certain passages. Basically, Dali is setting down his parameters for what makes the artist great, and he says that it's the point of the book, which is revealed at the end in two lines. "...he will find it exactly in the last two lines of this book." Lines? Or lines? Word or sketch, I'm keeping my mind very open.

But it's a good point. I remarked to Dave that I pass by a fine art gallery in South Norwalk every day, and they regularly change out the paintings that they have in the front display to try and entice folks to come in. I've already seen that some of the works seem to have captured something of the spirit in them, while others seem to be merely color studies of various subjects in pretty frames. Some seem to be art, others seem to be paint on a canvas. Perhaps Dali will give me a better vocabulary to make my explanations from.

We shall see.

And now, on to the rest of the book.