How I created the Melting Woman

My blue melting woman painting is one of my favorites. It is not particularly realistic, but I had a vision in mind and I was incredibly proud of myself when I was able to bring it to life. Usually the image I seek to create changes between the design phase and the result. This is not what happened here.

In middle school, I learned about the work of Salvador Dali. To this day, he is still one of my greatest inspirations. One night, as I was falling asleep, I was thinking about him and his painting, The Persistence of Memory. I remember learning that Dali had begun painting objects as "melting" because he wanted to imagine what they would look like as soft cheeses. When I first learned about this, I had never had or seen a soft cheese. Recently, I have been more exploratory with my eating habits and sought out a wedge of Brie and a wedge of Camembert. I also have done more research on soft cheese and how they are made.

This particular night, I was thinking about my personal experience with soft cheeses, and how Dali must have seen the cheeses to imagine other objects acting the same way. Was he fascinated by them? Were they so essential to his daily life that he saw them in his dreams? I was then reminded of his earlier painting, Sleep, and My Half-awake mind, which merged the image of my grandmother after her stroke, the unpleasant way a stroke droops the features and dulls the mind, with these paintings. My grandmother made a full recovery from her stroke and regained almost all motor function.

At the time of painting this, I was having a hard time keeping myself out of the hole. My anxiety depression and loneliness were starting to crush me. I had no confidence in my life other than my significant other, and I felt like every time I went to class or to work, I was faking a smile and playing pretend. I felt less like I was wearing a mask and more like I was melting away. Like parts of me were falling off, never to be found again. So when my brain created this image of a woman, half melted, I loved it. I felt it.

The biggest issue I have with this piece is that I painted it. I have not yet learned how to keep a sketch on the canvas while painting it, so I had to make it cartoonish to keep the original sketch visible. I will, in the future, be working on a more realistic version, probably out of colored pencil.

Why is she blue? Because I had no skin-toned paints, I wanted her to be reminiscent of the Corpse Bride, particularly her pink blush on blue skin.