Image Essay #6: Fore,Middle, and Background

This piece is called "Woman at the Window at Figueras" by Salvador Dali. It was painted on canvas in oil in 1926. The Original was 9.5"x9.8". It was painted during Dali's surrealism period.

Dali is a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, and designer. He studied in Barcelona and Madrid Spain. He then moved to Paris in the late 1920's to join the Surrealist artists. He then became the world's best-known Surrealist artist. Objects in his paintings are usually common objects that have been deformed and changed in bizarre ways. His most famous painting is the "Persistence of Memory" which many of us would know as the painting with all the melting clocks in a weird landscape. He was an unusual man but was a very good surrealist painter.

This painting of his is very easy to see the foreground, middleground, and background. In the foreground, area that appears closest to the viewer, is the woman in the chair. She appears to be in the foreground because she is not completely in the picture, looks very large compared to the other images in the painting, and has the more bright colors used.

The middleground is the area that is not the focal point of this painting, but can be the focal point. It is set behind the foreground images but appears to be closer than the images in background. The main building is the middleground, however, I would also consider the mountains to also be in the middleground area.

The background should be the last thing that you look at. Even though some important elements may be hidden in the background, it usually is non-important and does not serve a great purpose. The background is the area that appears the furthest away from the viewer. Generally, like in this picture, the background will be much lighter than the middle and foreground objects to not draw away from the more important objects and also because that is when naturally happens; objects become lighter the further they are away. The sky and some may say the mountains would be the background of Dali's painting.