Neve Van Herk

My inspiration for this artwork was Raden Saleh’s ‘Boschband’ (Forest Fire), which was painted in the 1850s. Raden Saleh (1813-1880) is considered Indonesia’s first modern painter, making trips across oceans to get to Europe and Asia, making stops to create paintings. I was struck by the realism and beauty of this piece of work. There is a clear sense of fear and chaos in the depiction of a forest fire, creating a tense, terrifying offence to the audience. The gorgeous colour palette consists mainly of warm colours and tones (red, orange, yellow, yellow-orange) as well as subtle colder tones and colours (purple, blue-purple, blue, blue-green, green and yellow green).  The numbers that I decided to use in my painting was two and seven; as they are my lucky numbers.

These are my lucky numbers because they remind me of a friend that I lost, who was 9. So therefore I put 2 and 7 together because they loved these numbers as well as it adding up to their age. The decisions I made was using texture paint to create a rocky surface to my darker side, this reflects on the painting because of the rock that the 7 animals are seen to balance on. I used macaws as a symbol of transitioning into something new. This also reflects on the painting because of the clear horizon in the back of the painting… Ludicrously describing to me that no matter what situation you can be in there will always be a brighter side in the end. As well as that, I manipulated the surface by using pencils to carve out shapes out of the paint, as well as using sponges to create swirls in my painting. The story that I think my work depicts is that sometimes the worst things can happen to you when you least expect it. The problem that I suffered with this artwork was in the creation of the macaws, as these birds have very intricate patterns and details, I found myself having trouble trying to figure out how to create them.