My piece is inspired by the artwork
‘Dancing Mutants’ (1965) by Hernando R. Ocampo. Hernando R. Ocampo was a Filipino national artist in the visual arts and was known for his abstract arts. He made this painting after he heard about the horrors of the atomic bombs that were dropped in Japan near the end of WW2. Some parts of the artwork are meant to represent the people affected by the bombs mutating due to the radiation, this is why it is called dancing mutants.
I was drawn to this artwork as I have been to both the USA and Japan and because I am heavily interested in history and the events that took place in WW2. I have made my artwork abstract just like Dancing Mutants and i have also made many parts of my artwork uneven, using different shapes and sizes. My background isn’t just colours split into perfect borders, it makes it seem like the red and the blue are merging in the middle and making it look imperfect. On the top of the painting, I have put the US flag on the blue side and the Japan flag on the red side. During the war, the US was an allie ‘viewed in many places as the good side’ and Japan was on the Axis ‘ commonly viewed as the bad side’. In my painting the colour of axis is red and the colour of the allies is blue. The imperfections in my artwork represent that war is not perfect and that many bad things and unpredictable events can happen (like the nuclear bombs in Japan.) The number 45 appears on the bottom of my painting 3 times, this represents the year (1945) which was the atomic bombs were dropped.