Aalia Gupta

My artwork is based upon the painting from the National Gallery Singapore called ‘What Would You Do If These Crackers Were Real Pistols?’ by F.X. Harsono. The presented piece of art (heavily simplified) is of a pile of guns around each other along with a desk and chair. This is an extraordinary art piece because a simple pile and desk and chairs represented such a large common problem for everywhere throughout the world. During this process I have also researched a fair bit about the author, and I will now share my top 3 fun facts. I have learnt that when he created this, he was trying to get the message that the Chinese violence was enough and that he did not want this to happen anymore. He was inspired to create this artwork one day when he saw a vendor with lots of little pink guns and he bought the supply. After creating ‘What Would You Do If These Crackers Were Real Pistols? ’ a reporter asked what he would do and to my surprise he replied by saying, “my teacher shamelessly”. What I most enjoyed about the painting was that although he had an answer, he was curious to know what others would do and this is something that I really liked, he left a book on the desk, this was something that people could write in to answer the question in the title. This was the aspect that showed that although he liked his art he was completely open to people who interpreted it in all of the different ways.

When I was creating my interpretation, I was told to choose some numbers that had to represent something so I thought that I would do the year with the greatest number of school shootings, and so I went to find the year. It turns out 2016 and 2018 both had the same number of shootings. I decided to choose the year 2018 because that was the year that stood out the most to me. I put much thought into it because a lot of things that were great for me also happened under 2018 so I was pretty set on that year. I mostly chose 2018 because that was my first big transition in school from the infants into year 3, it seemed like such a large transition at the time. The first few lessons were spent researching about similar structures. We tried some experimenting in our books, I realised that making abstract backgrounds were easy and very fun! I decided that if I was going to do this piece well then it had to be something that I enjoyed. I started with making a background that included colours that ranged from the deepest blues to the lightest greens. That was when I decided that I would do a realistic drawing with shading of a gun to contrast. The drawing part was easy enough, but it was suggested to do a grey wash over the top of the gun. The story relevant to me that this painting shows is that school shootings are one of the largest problems that schools have, and this shows how happy I am that we live in a safe country where although the likelihood is not non-existent, but it is very low, and I am sure that brings relief to people of Singapore.