Gala appears to be relaxing, resting even, in the bright sunshine. Her face dominates the composition, covering the entire left hand side of the painting, whilst the opposing side is decorated with broken buildings and other stone items. The artist then adds two lamb chops onto her shoulder in the entirely surrealist world that he lived in for many years. He was devoted to this woman and featured her in a number of paintings. She was both beautiful and ideal for modelling, but also had a significant role within his life which inspired him to capture that with his brush. He had always had a strange relationship with women but this relationship helped him to overcome those issues.
Whilst the surrealist approach would often confuse the more occasional viewer, looking as if items had been added purely at random, there was actually a lot of thinking behind his work. Theories from all manner of sources as well as traditional literature would inspire Dali's ideas and then we can see items featuring many times across different paintings that create a type of Dali language which does make sense once you have studied it a little. The same can be said for a number of other modern artists as well, where they would go much deeper than just pure aesthetic pleasure.
"...As soon as we had got settled in Portlligat I painted a portrait of Gala with a pair of raw chops poised on her shoulder. The meaning of this, as I later learned, was that instead of eating her, I had decided to eat a pair of raw chops instead. The chops were in effect the expiatory victims of abortive sacrifice - like Abraham's ram, and William Tell's apple. My edible, intestinal and digestive representations at this period assumed an increasingly insistent character. I wanted to eat everything, and I planned the building of a large table made entirely of hard-boiled egg so that it could be eaten..."
The artist describing this painting within "The Secret Life of Salvador Dali"
