Noah Karunanithi

My inspiration for this piece of work was the painting Dancing Mutants by Hernando R Ocampo 1965. He was born on 28th of April 1911 and sadly passed away on the 28th of December. Ocampo was a Filipino artist best known for his abstract paintings. I feel like I can relate to this as I feel I am an abstract person with many cool ideas when it comes to art.

He used bold colour palettes and biomorphic shapes inspired by not only his country’s landscape and by science fiction novels, He was also a self-taught artist . I enjoyed doing this painting as I found the backstory of how he was inspired to create this painting quite interesting, He was inspired because of Ocampo’s reaction to the horrors after the hiroshima bomb ‘Little Boy’ because he saw a film and the creatures mutated from the after effects of the Hiroshima bombing. His other paintings reflected the harsh realities living in his country during the second world war.

I chose the numbers five, zero and four. I chose number five because I was born in may which is the fifth month of the year. I chose zero because I have known zero people in my life who have been in a bombing. I chose the number four because that’s when he was born in April which is the fourth month of the year and I feel a close connection to that month because that was the month my mum was born in and I think I have a really close relationship with my mum.

My composition consists of many different shades of red’s and green’s clashing together and in the middle I think it was a quite abstract idea to make a fire going through the middle as when bombs crash it causes fire. I used cubes to create a square pattern going around the canvas and some pieces of layering and some cropping for example I Cropped half the zero and continued on the other side of the painting.

I chose some light and some violent reds to show how heartbreaking and how much damage a bomb can do to something. I chose quite light greens to show the bushes were on fire during the atomic bomb. My work is a new modern version of the original painting. It speaks ‘mutants’ in general and danger beneath; once the danger ends.