My inspiration for this piece of work was BoschBrand (Forest Fire) by Raden Saleh from Indonesia. Raden Saleh was a painter from the Dutch East Indies - his work reflects the 19th century romanticism which was popular in Europe at the time. The paintings of Raden Saleh tend to point out the uneasy tension between his Javanese heritage and his creative style which was aligned with the European artistic traditions.

Many of his paintings explore wildlife, delivering dramatic effect with the depiction of the ferocity of the predatory animals such as lions or tigers on canvas. Raden Saleh spent considerable time studying the anatomy of lions and used that to create many of his paintings. Finding a place in his artworks are also the Sumatran tigers that can only be found in Indonesia.

His painting BoschBrand (1849) also draws attention to his obsession with animals. In the piece BoschBrand, the artist shows animals running away from the forest fire to the edge of the cliff, playing out the tale of life and death. The theme deeply resonates with the tragic fate of the South China tiger that originated 2 million years ago in China and drastically declined in number over the centuries, with now only 50 standing and none of them to be found in the wild. In China, 2214 km2 of government protected area was surveyed to look for any
remaining wild South-China tigers, yet it proved futile. The significance of the decline is further underlined by other historical events. Maharaja of Surguja killed 1710 tigers (the person who killed the most tigers in the world); in 2015, there were the most forest fires that affected the wildlife too. These numbers are quite significant to the painting.

Considered the king of the beasts, the tiger is strong and brave, which is the subject of my painting. In my painting, I mainly used warm colours to represent fire and also orange and black to represent the stripes and fur of a tiger. On the top left, you can see that there are circles in different sizes and shades of grey, this is to represent the smoke from the conflagration. Below the circles symbolising smoke, I drew an eye. Within the eye, the pupil is a mix of red and yellow, resembling how sharp the eye of the tiger is; the flames following in the top-right corner represent the wings that the animals would have hoped to have to fly away from the to save themselves. On the bottom-right, there are lines representing the trees and behind, different prints of squares showing the fire burning those trees. Some challenges I faced included creating the colours since the background was all warm colours and mixing new colours different than that of the background took a long time to figure out. Another struggle was the numbers I had made since I had fire strokes around it to create more details. The most successful thing I did in my piece was the tiger eye linking to the wings because there were multiple meanings in that structure and it opened my imagination.