> It is a form of denial of
> explosive geniuses like Dali, and it attempts to belittle the truly
> momentous amount of damn hard work and technical attention Dali paid
> to
> each and every thought, and brushstroke, in his day.
>
Shit. Inspiration and technique are two different things.
Making suggestions about the source of the former says
absolutely nothing, either way, about the latter. There's
no dispute that for draughtmanship Dali was among the
best ever.
> Again, my memory from Dali's notebooks was that he was very much
> _against_ any tampering with his completely normal hallucinagenic
> perceptions. He simply didn't need it.
>
Maybe he didn't need it any more, at the time of writing,
having done so much of it previously? Of course, to
admit to previous use, would be to compromise his
image as absolutely self-sufficient (not to say absolutely
self-obsessed) genius, wouldn't it?
BTW, for what it's worth, I heard many years ago that
at one time he was in the habit of ingesting psilocybin
every day, and had done so in the company of John
Lennon.
I already did a web search on this, coming up with
many associations between Dali and drugs, but no
straight statements that he did them. Any ideas
for further research? Apart from the words of the
man himself, of course! :-)
Robin