Achintya Aggarwal
My artwork was inspired by Boschbrand (Forest Fire) by Raden Salah (m.1811 – 1880). Raden Saleh was an Arab-Javanese artist who was considered as the first “modern” Indonesian artist.
Boschbrand uses a contrasting colour scheme, which is used to create a separation between the foreground and background but also gives a sense of dramatic feel. I used this colour scheme in my painting by using brighter more fiery colours in the background and more earthier and green tones in the foreground like the way that contrast was used in the original painting, on top of that, I have decided to make many of my numbers and motifs based on the tigers in the foreground as personally, my favourite animals are tigers. One example of such numbers is the number 8 which I have made a contrasting beige compared to the yellow and orange background as I want it to be in the centre without taking attention away from the motifs. Another example of this are the tiger and knife motifs surrounding the 8 because of the constant hunting down of tigers as every single tiger subspecies is now endangered. Because these numbers and motifs are what I want to bring to attention, I have placed them in an off centred centre area to slightly imbalance the painting and make the artwork slightly more tense and bring them to attention and am also pointing the background towards them by fading in from a darker to a lighter colour.
I painted on a few earthy blocks and beige sticks on the bottom to represent the final parts of the forest burning down then I dry brushed the background on top of it to give a dry atmosphere the painting and to slightly cover up the blocks and fade them out a bit to make them more subtle, as I needed to bring out the focal point rather than the background and blocks.
This artwork tells the story of how deforestation and poaching is slowly killing our planet which I think is important because many people don’t take responsibility for their actions which can kill the earth, a lot of them are adults because they are not going to be living in the world that they destroyed, but rather I will, and I think that it is important to make sure that the future generations have a clean, unpolluted world to live in.