Ira Gautam
My inspiration for this piece of work was ‘Dancing Mutants’ by Hernando R. Ocampo. The artist was lived from 1911 to 1978; he created ‘Dancing Mutants’ with oil paints in 1965. The original painting was inspired by the Hiroshima atomic bomb; I really liked how abstract the painting was, because it takes some time
to recognise the fact that the background is in fact a bomb blast and the fact that the green strokes are actual people.
In my painting, I used the numbers 226,000- this is because at first glance the background of the painting looked like a berry to me, so I found out what the National berry of my country is and how many berry farms it has. I’m from India, and I discovered that its national berry is the goji berry, which grows in over 226,000 farms in India.
I also used the number 160; this is the number of nuclear weapons my country (India) owns in their army. This is the number I picked because Dancing Mutants is about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.
For my background of my painting, I made a curved gradient of red over green; I did this because I thought it representing bloodshed taking over peace and serenity- the gradient is curved because it is a symbol of how easily things can slowly dissolve into chaos.
In my painting I also used wooden block stamps to make squares in a staircase pattern to represent the. Buildings of Hiroshima before they were bombed. As well as that, I used rectangular blocks in the red section of painting to depict houses blowing up due to the ferocity of the bomb, as well as pink square blocks to represent the houses and lives of people organised before the horror the bomb created.
For my stencil I made a goji berry and an atomic bomb; the goji berry is overlapped by the buildings in my painting because it’s link to ‘Dancing Mutants’ is less direct than the link between the atomic bomb, which is in front of the buildings, and Hernando R. Ocampo’s original painting.
This painting is full of both direct and indirect links to the original painting, ‘Dancing Mutants’. Both background are of bomb blasts. My foreground is full of buildings form Hiroshima, which is what Ocampo’s Painting is about. I believe that his painting tells a story of how easily everything you know can vanish- I tried to make this the story of my painting too, with death and horror overpowering the lives of everyone who was affected by the atomic bomb blast that first took place in 1945.