Leoni 1966

This is ‘Leoni’, made with watercolor on paper by Salvador Dalí in 1926, when he was just 22. I can imagine him, young and full of beans, making this. The washes of color are so translucent and fluid, you can imagine the quickness of his hand as he laid down those first marks. Look at how the colors bleed into each other, creating these wonderful soft edges and dreamlike imagery. I wonder what he was thinking when he painted the male lion roaring with such ferocity, while the female looks on, placid and calm. Or the figure beneath the lions sitting with a staff among these almost psychedelic botanical forms. The whole thing reminds me of Arthur Rackham and other illustrators of fairy tales, who were also exploring the fantastic and the subconscious. The history of painting is full of these kinds of conversations, artists responding to each other across time, inspiring each other to see the world in new ways. The way Dalí embraced ambiguity reminds us that art doesn't always need to have a fixed meaning.