Abigail Ashman
My inspiration for this piece of work was the painting forest fire by Raden Saleh which was made in 1849. Raden Saleh Sjarif Boestaman was a pioneering Indonesian Romantic painter of Arab-Javanese ethnicity. He was considered to be the first modern artist from Indonesia and in the 19th century became very well known. Raden Saleh was born in the 19th century in the village of Terboyo, near Semarang on the island of Java and lived from 1811-1880. Raden was first taught art by a famous Belgian artist called A.J. Payen discovered his talent and persuaded the colonial government of the Netherlands to send Raden Saleh to the Netherlands to study art. Saleh always had a passion for art so he later decided to move to Europe in 1829 when he was only 18 years old to go study art under Cornelius Kruseman and Andreas Schelfhoult.
\When he painted this beautiful piece in 1842, Saleh was 31 years old and gave this painting to the King of the Netherlands, King Willem III where he was then named “Schilder des Konings” which means king's painter. I enjoyed the composition because I really like how you can see how high up the cliff really is by looking at the smoke and how the trees look very small and far away from the cliff's edge. What I also really enjoyed about this unique painting was that it was very packed as you can see lots of animals hanging onto the cliff and that I can see things that Saleh chose to make look like some animals and trees were far away which I found very creative.
And lastly I found the contrasting colours very appealing as it makes me focus on the tigers at the front as they are the same colour as the fire you can see in the background. The numbers I chose to combine into my painting were 2, 0, 1, 0, 6. I chose those numbers because when four of them come together they form 2010 which is the year of the tiger. This relates to me because 2010 is the year of the tiger and also the year I was born in. Then in another row I had the numbers 6 and 0 to make 60 because 60,000 koalas died in Australia due to forest fires in 2019-2020. This affects me because I’m half Australian and koalas are one of my favourite animals.