HelloAlexCLMon, Dec 14, 2009 In painting, Dali strives for perfection, but this perfection already innately exists before the medium is touched. The blank canvas is already perfect, contained, and indivisible. “Your canvas is one and indivisible and round, hence complete, enclosed within itself and perfect as a circle” (50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship 47). Perfection is inherent to the blank canvas itself. Thus, the need to paint is not predicated upon the desire for perfection, which already presents itself “fulfilled” in the blank canvas, complete and untouched. The need to paint is, first a foremost, the need to create something to fill in the void that is the blank canvas, but this need is satisfied in a very particular and precise way that acknowledges and mirrors the void beneath, that does not destroy the blankness but duplicates it in another fashion at the same moment it is “too quickly and irreparably soiled” (SMC 45). To paint, for Dali, is to create a semblance, to conceal if not to fill the void, and as a semblance it is absolutely essential. The semblance functions to conceal and reveal the void simultaneously, and it is a need because one is born a void, which is to say being born is not being born at all—the newborn is a blank canvas and in this way born dead. “Look! Salvador Dali has just been born!...Look at me!...You see nothing? And all of you—do you see nothing either?...It will not be so the day I die!” (Secret Life 34). The task of the child will be to fill or cover this nothing, the nothing that is he, with a semblance that persuades others, and perhaps himself, that there is something there—something real, hard, solid—a dissimulation to cover the void from which this something began....In other words, the conception of the (blank) canvas is the painted image itself.
In painting, Dali strives for perfection, but this perfection already innately exists before the medium is touched. The blank canvas is already perfect, contained, and indivisible. “Your canvas is one and indivisible and round, hence complete, enclosed within itself and perfect as a circle” (50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship 47). Perfection is inherent to the blank canvas itself. Thus, the need to paint is not predicated upon the desire for perfection, which already presents itself “fulfilled” in the blank canvas, complete and untouched. The need to paint is, first a foremost, the need to create something to fill in the void that is the blank canvas, but this need is satisfied in a very particular and precise way that acknowledges and mirrors the void beneath, that does not destroy the blankness but duplicates it in another fashion at the same moment it is “too quickly and irreparably soiled” (SMC 45). To paint, for Dali, is to create a semblance, to conceal if not to fill the void, and as a semblance it is absolutely essential. The semblance functions to conceal and reveal the void simultaneously, and it is a need because one is born a void, which is to say being born is not being born at all—the newborn is a blank canvas and in this way born dead. “Look! Salvador Dali has just been born!...Look at me!...You see nothing? And all of you—do you see nothing either?...It will not be so the day I die!” (Secret Life 34). The task of the child will be to fill or cover this nothing, the nothing that is he, with a semblance that persuades others, and perhaps himself, that there is something there—something real, hard, solid—a dissimulation to cover the void from which this something began....In other words, the conception of the (blank) canvas is the painted image itself.