Matilda J W

My inspiration for this piece of work was forest fire by Raden Saleh born in 1811, the artist was an Indonesian artist. He grew up in a town called Semarang. Semarang's area code is (+62)24. That’s why those numbers are on my piece of work, I thought it was a nice connection to both the artist and the painting, and also thought it was clever.

The reason of the number 5 was because there are five letters in his first name and the painting made 5 million sg dollars from being in the national gallery. Another thing leading to this is the tail shaped composition on the piece of artwork is supposed to represent a lemur's tail. I have chosen this because lima translated into English is five, and 5 was one of my numbers. The background colours of my piece of work are: red, yellow, orange and a bit of purple. I chose these colours as they are the colours of flames and fire. Something I enjoyed about the painting was the chaos in it.

The way I looked at it was like each animal was telling its own story and I think Saleh portrayed this very well and showed the emotions of each animal very vividly. I also chose this painting as I went to Indonesia in 2019 and experienced its culture and was close to picking 2019 to be my number for my piece of work experienced its culture and was close to picking 2019 to be my number for my piece of work.​