Olympe Paoli

My piece was inspired by Hendra Gunawan’s War and Peace (1950s) and Hernando R. Ocampo’s Dancing Mutants (1965). My artwork originates from two paintings because my ideas changed over time and I used inspiration from both artworks for different parts of my final composition. War and Peace was painted by Hendra Gunawan, an Indonesian artist born in 1918 and who died in 1963, he chose to be an artist despite his parents’ high expectations. He was on the Front lines of the Indonesian “War of Independence” when he later painted War and Peace. Gunawan was a front-line sketcher and formed with other artists a group of front-line sketchers who merged in 1947, they wanted to show the hard parts of life on the front lines of the war field. Gunawan was known to also participate in shadow puppetry which might have some relation with one of the characters in the painting who is painted with a blue face and a thick black beard. Gunawan’s work also reflects his past as a revolutionist in the 1940s as an Indonesian Communist Party supporter. He was of the view that people should be able to understand paintings and that they should be the inspiration for paintings. From his painting, I integrated the colours that portray the peaceful mountains behind the mountains into the ocean that surrounds the island. I liked these colours as they give a sense of peace to the viewer as they are not too extreme and have a soft edge to them. Just like the artist, I used variations of bluish greens in my work to show the breaking of the waves as they pull away from the center of my artwork. 

Hernando R. Ocampo’s Dancing Mutants had more of an impact on my earlier plans for my work. The dancing figures that can be distinguished in his art remained me of a comic that I had read and liked called 5 Mondes, it is a French comic that translates into English as 5 Worlds. In this comic, there are dancing sand figures that show them the way and Ocampo’s dancing leaf figures reminded me of them. Their sense of peaceful dancing was very inspiring and I wanted to recreate that in my piece. 

I based my painting around my role as a sustainability rep and my holidays in Greece on my grandfather’s sailing boat. When we go to Greece, we go from island to island and the colour of the sea is amazing, it fits well with the colours of War and Peace and it reminds them of my time around those islands and the problems that they are going to face with climate change. With sea levels rising, it isn’t a secret that some islands won’t be able to stay above water. Small islands will sink and some of the islands that I’ve had the chance of visiting won’t survive this dreadful part of the Earth’s history. My idea was to base my painting around that, I want to make viewers think when they look at my artwork and at the challenges that countries facing these changes will be facing. My artwork is my personal view of what we will be able to observe if we cast a hole in the sea in the future. In my artwork, I painted a three on the island because usually, we sail on my grandfather’s boat for three weeks during the summer. The island can be seen underneath my painting through the veil of plastic painted lightly over by a thin layer of dark blue acrylic paint that shows the water that covers lightly the view of what is lying underneath. I used honeycomb hardboard to construct the island in layers and I painted the cardboard over to give it the greenish tint that implies that it has been undersea levels for a while and that it has lost some of its appeal. All in all, my painting is an overview of one branch of the future that we are heading towards.