Jessie Tan

My artwork is inspired by the ‘War & Peace’ painting, created by Hendra Gunawan (1950’s). He was born in Bandung, West Java, June 11, 1918. He is known to create vibrant, expressive work, however this particular piece incorporates earthy, dull colours. Both soldiers in the painting are portrayed to have deep organic and earthy qualities, the main features of guerrilla fighters. I wanted to include these elements into my painting, using dark, blueish colours with hints and tones of turquoise or forest green. My piece is based on the summer of 22’, when I travelled back to Vietnam for the holidays. I chose to do this as it was an extremely memorable and it stood out to me. Therefore my number in the piece is also 22.

You can see in my piece that instead of the mountainous landscape behind, I used water and the swell of the sea as the main setting in order to link back to my initial idea. I tried to replicate the fluid strokes that Hendra used, overlapping the blues with green. This technique evokes a sense of tranquility. I chose to make the water an emerald colour instead of blue, as there is often a connection to traditional Javanese spiritual symbolism in Hendra’s works, in which, ‘green is the colour of the divine.’

I also used a sunset background to replicate the sun looming over the mountains in ‘War and Peace’. This conveys a sense of peace and harmony. My sunset however, is a lot more bold and vibrant, in order to communicate the feeling of fun and thrill during the summer. I used texture paste to replicate the whitewash of the wave. I think giving texture to the piece makes it a lot more unique as well. Using a pallet knife, I spread the paste over the piece in an uneven layer, so it seems more similar to the whitewash we see in real life - messy and not uniform. I then faded the white to a pale blue. In addition, I used bubble wrap and dabbed in blue, then on to the piece in order to express the chaos of war. I chose to do this because although in ‘War and Peace’, it seems calm and serene, the war is still happening, just not visible. Therefore, I used bubble wrap in order to communicate this. It can also be interpreted as the movement of the waves. Furthermore, I mixed sand and texture paste together with paint so it would feel and look like real sand. Lastly, I wanted to incorporate the tree in the background, but I altered it into a palm tree to fit my main idea.