Dali, Salvador

Fourteen years ago I went to collect my GCSE grades. Amongst them stood my rewards for creating a cardboard box replica of Brighton and Hove Albion's former home, The Goldstone Ground. The examiner saw fit to give me an E and both the ground and my handiwork were destroyed soon after. 

  My attention to the art world has been minimal ever since, although it has been one of those things that, for a while, I've wanted to know more about. The BBC series Modern Masters has enabled me to do that. Week one was about Andy Warhol, showing how he reinvented what could be considered art and predicted our current obsession with celebrity. Week two was about Henri Matisse and how his experimentation with colour has influenced fashion and advertising as well as the art world.

  Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali remain and this morning on a visit to the library with my twins, while they bum-shuffled their way around pulling books from shelves, I took the time out to flick through a book of Dali's work. His Swans Reflecting Elephants (pictured) leaped out at me. I found it beautiful and mesmerising, finding it impossible to spot the difference between the swans and their reverse elephant images reflected in the pool below. At this point Ned had clambered onto my lap and was growing impatient that I wasn't turning the pages quickly enough and we had a brief page-turning battle so that I could further examine the painting. I don't know if Dali was trying to say anything about the world or if the similar shapes of swan and elephant head just struck him, but it made me think about the nature of reality and how truth is not necessarily what we perceive it to be. If the truth of our lives were reflected in a pool, then I imagine they would take on surprising shapes also. I guess I am veering towards my own faith in spiritual realities which is perhaps part of the reason why this painting appealed to me, or perhaps I just appreciated the oddness of it. 

  Like Warhol and Matisse, Dali was a character that influenced places beyond the art world. Sesame Street are one of many to parody his work; he designed the Chupa Chups logo; Noel Fielding cites him as inspiration for his own surrealist brand of comedy; he had a carefully waxed and extravagant moustache and he walked an anteater around Paris on a lead. Why wasn't any of this discussed during my Art GCSE?

  He wasn't a man lacking in confidence, speaking about himself, as boxers often do, in the third person: "Every morning, upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali." I look forward to seeing what Alastair Sooke makes of him a week Sunday.