Portrait de Sara María Larrabure 1963

This is Salvador Dalí’s portrait of Sara María Larrabure. It's an oil painting and he really goes for it with the blue, doesn’t he? There’s something about the way the sky is painted, all kind of melty and soft, it's a world of dreams. Check out the brushstrokes in that sky and landscape, so deliberate and smooth. Dalí is trying to conceal the process, and the brush marks disappear into a soft haze. It makes the portrait feel timeless, like a memory surfacing from the depths of the unconscious. I'm drawn to that swirling water in the foreground. It's such a strange, beautiful touch, adding a dash of surrealism to an otherwise conventional portrait. Dalí’s work reminds me of other surrealists who were interested in dreams and psychology. But Dalí, with his wild imagination, always brought his own special kind of magic to the canvas. Art’s like that, an ongoing conversation where artists borrow, steal, and transform ideas into something new and surprising.