Alice au pays des merveilles 1968

This is Salvador Dalí’s watercolor and gouache painting, Alice au pays des merveilles, and, wow, it’s a trip! The way Dalí layers translucent washes with these assertive, almost cartoonish marks is so playful. You can really sense him working through the image, letting the paint do its thing. Looking closely, I love how the orange and blue bleed together at the base, creating this fiery, dreamlike space. And then there's this mushroom shape in the foreground, outlined in a thick, almost gloppy blue—it grounds the whole composition. It's interesting, right? How he balances control and chaos, the fluid and the defined. Dalí’s was deeply influenced by the Surrealist movement, interested in automatism: the release of unconscious thoughts and feelings. It makes me think of Philip Guston, actually, another artist who embraced a kind of raw, honest mark-making to explore the depths of the imagination. Ultimately, it's a reminder that art is a process of discovery, where meaning emerges through the act of making itself.