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Salvador Dali was born on Monday, May 11 1904, in the small Spanish town of Figures, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, approximately sixteen miles from the French border in a region known as Catalonia. His parents supported his talent and built him his first studio while he was still a child in their summer home at Cadaques. Dali went on to attend the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, Spain. He was married to Gala Eluard in 1934 and died on 23 January 1989 in a hospital in Figures. Dali never limited himself to one style or particular medium. The painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus was created in 1937 by oil on canvas by Salvador Dali. This painting uses a lot of images to say what it means, for example, a person, a hand, water, a starving dog, a chess board, a canyon or cliff, and people. This is not to fill the paper or distract the viewer from the suggested meaning or point, but to support the idea that hope and despair are reflections of one another; on opposite sides of a coin, spinning in mid-air, waiting to land and fix or destroy everything. The first thing that one thinks upon first seeing it, from far away, is that Dali just painted the same thing twice. From afar, it appears as if he simply cut the canvas down the middle and made one side brown and the other blue, but on closer inspection, one sees that the two sides, although very similar, are nothing alike.
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