Francesca Cavalli

My inspiration for this piece of work was war and peace by Hendra Gunawan (1950). This is an Indonesian piece about the war between them and the Dutch, for Indonesia's independence. This piece of work shows 2 fighters on a mountain terrain looking out into the horizon. Hendra Gunawan was an Indonesian painter best known for his combination of western painting techniques and traditional Indonesian aesthetics.

I found this painting inspiring because the mountains symbolise inspiration and strength and a message of hope. This really inspired me as I always go skiing every winter in Switzerland so I thought that I would relate to those bright blue mountains seen in the painting and I could use them in my piece. The number that I generated from the painting was the number 1 as I thought that the number 1 really looked like the gun that the man is holding in the painting but in the end the number I chose to link to this was the number 4 because when I first started skiing, I was 4. At that time, I didn’t really like the snow as I thought it was too cold but now I am starting to love going skiing every year.

For the compositions of my painting, I decided that I wanted to make my mountains pop off the page and be the first thing you see so I knew they had to be big. They started off as triangles in pencil drawing and then changed into more steep and jagged edges to make them look a bit more realistic. Then i started to add the things I need to go skiing to make it relate more to me, so I decided to add in some glasses and some skis. For the texture side of things, I decided to use poster paint to make my mountains more jagged. At the start I ran into some problems that my work looked like meringues and not mountains and then I never could get the perfect shape for the mountains but by the end I finally found a good shape for them which made them look more realistic. I also used a lot of cardboard to make my trees, my numbers and my goggles.

I decided to use a relieved surface instead of paint because I really wanted it to be bulkier and out of the page instead of flat. And finally, I wanted my skis to be painted on the composition but then I decided to make them unique and to use popsicle sticks instead to make them look better. My work tells a story that “when skiing life has no blues” as it shows that when you're skiing all your problems float away.