Monty O'Sullivan

Dancing mutants was made by Hernando R Ocampo in 1965. He was born in 1911 in Manila and passed away in 1978. During a visit to the national gallery, I was intrigued by this artwork and once I found out what the meaning was, I was even more interested.

I liked his use of contrasting colours and dark gradience scattered throughout the whole painting. I feel like this gives a sort of mysterious or slightly sinister feeling and it leaves you wondering what could be back there or what is happening in the dark. This painting represents the horrors of war, more specifically the dropping of two nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 during the Second World War. Even with is home country of The Philippines being occupied by Japan in wartime, he still painted this showing just how terrible it was.

With my piece, I used a stencil of an exploding hand for a few reasons: one, to represent the explosions and how it affected the people in Japan, two, my great grandfather had a live grenade explode in his hand during the Burma campaign which was run by the British to combat the invading Japanese, three, the two intact fingers in the middle represents the genbaku dome which remained intact even through the explosion and also symbolises Japan peaceful future after this event. I decided to match the colours used in the original painting and for the numbers I did the latitude and longitude of Hiroshima, the age of the pilot and the height the bomb was dropped.