The side-bar of “Favorites” no longer expands in Safari. It has to be expanded every time I open up a Safari window. That’s lots of times a day. The other day I mistakenly clicked on news. I hadn’t even opened news before. I got the BBC with the story of Dali and the Flying Cats.
The actual title of the photo is Dali Atomicus. His famous Atomicus painting is on the right side of the picture.
It wasn’t my favourite photo for the flying cats - their frozen in motion poses seemed anguished and injured to me and I envisioned cats making a horrible injured landing.
That was not the case. I think the cats were owned by the photographer’s daughter working as an assistant on the photo. In an interview many decades after this 1948 picture she told the story of the staging and making of the picture by famous artist Halsman.
“The original, unretouched version of the photo reveals its secrets: An assistant held up the chair on the left side of the frame, wires suspended the easel and the painting, and the footstool was propped up off the floor. But there was no hidden trick to the flying cats or the stream of water. For each take, Halsman’s assistants—including his wife, Yvonne, and one of his daughters, Irene—tossed the cats and the contents of a full bucket across the frame. After each attempt, Halsman developed and printed the film while Irene herded and dried off the cats. The rejected photographs had notes such as “Water splashes Dalí instead of cat” and “Secretary gets into picture.” That’s demonstrated in the series of photos below.
I would like to quote the BBC article but it is nowhere to be found on their website. This seems to be the passing nature of news on the internet these days. Here and gone. But there is always something else - a Youtube video referenced in the article I did find. This is it HERE. These two artists made many photos together, and all are strange and wonderful. So it turns out there were 26 takes and 26 catching of the cats and drying them off until that final take.
So it turns out that yesterday’s picture of the Cheshire Cat Smile was in tune with the Dali story and not the second photo with my imaginary caption: “Three cats in hospital after famous photo shoot.”
That picture was taken the year I did the planter/pot garden for the Grimsby Animal Hospital to get them a Trillium Award. You can see the pots at the wall of the building. That’s how Trilliums mostly work - very neat gardens with big bold colour and abundant pot plantings.
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