Medina Movsumova

My piece of work was inspired by the Boschbrand painting by Raden Saleh. Raden Saleh was born in 1811 and passed away on the 23rd of April, 1880. Raden Saleh was considered to be Indonesia’s first modern painter, and even though he only created 18 paintings, they were all considered extremely beautiful. His career-defining paintings were watercolour sketches in 1822, then two very famous shipwreck paintings in the late 18th century, and finally historical paintings in 1838.

However, he only painted Boschbrand after 20 years of studying art in the Netherlands in 1849. When we visited the National Gallery, this particular painting caught my eye because of the colours and emotion of this painting. It’s almost like you are there with the animals, just by looking at their facial expressions. The fear and panic is completely captured in their eyes, but mainly the tiger that’s facing us. For my painting, I used the number 2009 because that was the year I was born, and I also used the number 40 because my grand-father got attacked by a bear in the woods at that age.

The reason i’m including that in my painting is because Boschbrand depicts a struggle, fear and aggressive animals, which he was also experiencing. A important thing that I decided was the background colour and texture. I ended up choosing a yellow background because I researched that yellow was the 2009 colour of the year. I also had to choose what colours the stamps would be, and I decided that they would be fire and ground colours. My painting includes three aspects of my personal self, the different sets of numbers and the background.​