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Advancing forth past Dalí’s relationship with Lorca, we will experience Dalí’s incessant eccentricities. Dalí’s homecoming permitted him to concentrate more on his artistic abilities. His exhilaration while exploring his talents prohibited any disturbances. What can be construed as pure foolishness can also be perceived as clever improvisation.
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Salvador Dalí, after being expelled from the university, returned home to a very upset and mortified father in Figueres. While he was planning his future escape to Paris, he managed to keep himself busy in Figueres. In February of 1927, he began his mandated nine-month military service. Because of his ‘parental influence’, his per diem service allowed him to sleep at home and not be subjected to a normal duty roster. It was most likely that he spent most of his time entertaining the other conscripts. He was able to paint and to create as much as he could. During this time he designed the set of Federico Garcia Lorca’s play Marianita Pineda and wrote articles and drew illustrations for the publication El Gallo del Defensor. But what took up most of his time were his paintings. He wrote to Lorca in the fall of 1927:
Don’t tell anyone, but I think I’m doing really great things. I paint with true fury. I work hard at a line or a dot, erase it, and remake it a thousand times.
In his autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, Dalí tells us a story from this time about how much he could be caught up in his paintings and how normal occurrences with him became events to remember.
One day Dalí was in his studio working on a new, large Cubist painting. He was caught up with the excitement of it. He was working in his studio in a bathrobe, and had lost the belt earlier. Because the open robe hampered his movements, he looked around for a substitute belt. He saw an electrical cord and grabbed it. There was a small lamp that was attached to the cord, and because the lamp did not weight too much, Dalí used the cord for a belt, letting the lamp hang down behind him. He continued his painting and forgot all else.
A while later, his sister, Anna Marie, came to his studio to inform him that the family had important visitors and that he was to go down and meet with them. Not too happily, he tore himself away from his painting and went down to the family living room to meet with the guests. His parents were aghast at the sight of him wearing his paint-spattered bathrobe, but did not notice the lamp dangling behind him because it was hidden in the folds of his robe. Because the lamp was so light, Dalí too had forgotten that it was there. After introductions were made, Dalí sat down, not only breaking the lamp, but causing the light bulb to explode with a very loud burst, like a bomb.
Dalí relates this story that in his words shows "an unpredictable, faithful and objective hazard seems to have systematically singled out my life to make what are normally uneventful incidents violent, phenomenal and memorable."
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