The artwork above was produced by Fauzan Omar from Kelantan, Malaysia on a piece of grindedplywood. It is called the Fire Gutted Landscape. The theme is nature but more on environment.
It isabout the complexity of belonging, multiple narrative on identity and who own the land? Crossingboundaries and entering territories.As for the visual impact of the Fire Gutted Landscape comes in part of its erect size, a nearly elevenfeet wide piece of energy. By standing in front of the painting, viewers are consumed in thespectacular environment it creates. When closely observed, the specifics of the techniques used canbe fully appreciated, for example the lines that grow wide then diminish to create the leaf-likestructure. These variations gives the artwork a glittering, 3D quality. The entwining assortments oflines becomes a curious net that extends over the whole piece of artwork.
Fauzan Omar’s use of colour in Fire Gutted Landscape is ambiguously exquisite. The brown andgoldish colour seem to dominate, but when one steps away from the painting, a sudden sense ofpale mauve suddenly appears into work. The elusive nature of Omar’s use of colour as the painting isconstruct primarily of brown, dark brown just like a representation of the leaves that witters inautumn.
The use of line is concentrated around the perimeter of the plywood, serving to lead theeye around and then across the entire artwork.Because there is no main subject in the form of a human figure, place or thing, viewers mayberequired to patiently scan the world created by the artwork, continuously noticing new patterns andmaybe unexpected revelelations that cant be seen with only one look.Omar uses mainly uses a mixture of brown and dark brown to give the artwork an earthyappearance, further exposing on the idea of textual layers which are clearly shown to the viewer.The elements and principles Omar uses here are colour, contrast, texture, emphasis and repetition.The use of of colour gives the overall effects of the artwork which appears to be very earthy, autumnlike atmosphere and somewhat calm from the brown to the light brown to the intense streaks ofstriking black.Contrast was also used during the creating of the artwork to balance the artwork resulting in aformation which may have given Omar what he was looking for.Texture in the artwork is also a significant factor as well as in the majority of Omar’s artwork. His useof texture allows the artwork to have layers and a 3D like appearance immediately creating aglowing texture.
Omar achieves this through the use of brown to light brown.Emphasis is also seen in Omar’s artwork as there is thick of long streaks of black throughout theartwork. The black streaks sort of border the artwork which in return allows viewers to be directedin all four corners of the artwork.Fire Gutted Landscape(ii)Fire Gutted Landscape (ii)Analysis:By looking at the fire gutted landscape it appears rather muddy, a mixture of light brown and darkbrown tones. It seems that the artwork has been darkened with think black colour to make it appearmore vibrant. Omar also created a complex linear of dark patches using black.
For the initial layerthe colour was diluted, so that it could soaked into the length of the plywood, thereby creating asense of harmony.The colours that was used by Omar in Fire Gutted Landscape is particularly radiant. The brown andgoldish colour seem to dominate, take a step back and it could be seen that black lines. The mainnature of Omar’s use of colour as the artwork is construct primarily of brown, dark brown just like arepresentation of the leaves that witters in autumn. The use of line is concentrated around theperimeter of the plywood, serving to lead the eye around and then across the entire artwork.It could be seen that there is a repetition of leaf-like structure which seems informal and organic .The thick of long streaks of black is spreading throughout the artworks to blend in with the darkbrown to create a sense of harmony.
Interpretation:The thick black smoke rising from the burning trees, dust particles polluting our air, ash and fumes,hazy skies, low visibility. All this will again become a problem when haze comes to blight Malaysiaagain in the coming days. The haze makes us all vulnerable and brings disastrous effect to theenvironment and wildlife; no matter if it is a result of man's negligence or greed. but I believe thatthe haze can inspire new thoughts and feelings, inducing deeper sentiments that evolve ideationaland emotional responses. Can we agree that some degree of aesthetic insight lies in the unbearablehaze? Can charred remain of burned trees be considered as aesthetic artifacts place in the systempattern of burned and unburned landscapes be considered as art? One sure thing that arises fromthese ongoing tragedies that is not easy for me to deny or ignore is the beauty in the ugliness ofhaze ;The Hazardous Beauty;.This artwork is trying to tell us about the haze. The Haze will effect everyday Malaysians too.
Thehaze is a regular phenomenon faced by Malaysia and a few of her neighbouring countries. The hazeis basically pollution of atmosphere, which has clogged with pollutants and other substances fromforest fires. During the haze, hospitals and clinic will frequently report a dramatic increase inrespiratory problems, lung infections and asthma attack among the citizens.The haze has long-term side effects.
Prolonged inhalation of polluted air will result in serious lunginfection which particularly affects the elderly. The haze can also cause dry throats and result in fluor runny nose. Moreover, some people may come down with sore eyes(conjunctivitis), headache,dizziness, decrease lung function, chest pain.In addition, this will perhaps bring death to those who is not strong enough to withstand thedetrimental effects of the haze.
Besides causing ill health, the haze can cause serious injuries or livesto be lost. This is because the haze obscures vision on the road or in the air. The haze can cause acollision of pilots lose their bearing because the haze hampered their vision.Haze particles can greatly affect heart and lungs, especially to those who has already a weak heart orlung disease. There is currently no data both locally or internationally, that looks into the long termhealth impact of short-term, episodic exposure to haze.Researching this would be highly challenging. Any results would be based onl studies only, whichwould not be able to show a precise cause-and- effect relationship.
It would also be very difficult tostudy the direct long-term health effects due to the episodic exposure to haze, as there could bemany other contributing factors to the long-term health outcome we are calculating.Health impacts are related to concentrations as well as exposure, adding to the health status and theactivity of an individual. The health advisors will always issue a daily update on the haze base onforecast and studies.If the symptoms are moderate, one can avoid the haze by staying indoors with the windows anddoors shut, and turning on an effective air purifier should be sufficient enough to help withrespiration.
If the symptoms are more serious or it is unsure how badly the haze has spread, it is bestto consult with a nearby doctor. It is encourage not to self-medicate or use inhalers that is not recommended by a profesion. Forexample, an asthma medication that contains steroids and a long-acting bronchodilator medication.It is a prescription-only medication that is not without side effects and it should not be tried withoutproper medical advice and proper care.In conclusion, children, the elderly, and people with chronic lung disease, heart disease are moresensitive the health effects of haze, and should maintain the preventive measures in the MOH healthadvisory when air quality is poor. Citizens are advised to consult their doctor should they developbreathing difficulties to avoid any uncertainties. In addition, it is very advised that pregnant womenreduce exposure to haze for the health of their unborn baby.Judgement:Fauzan Omar created this artwork because he wanted to express his concern about the hazeproblem that has constantly been causing a lot of problem for Malaysians and help the citizen toknow the importance of what to do and not to do during haze.
Omar believe that the humans willalways try to prevail , grinding their teeth to find a solution for the haze.Art is at its best when it helps to advance some cause that will, presumably advance the interest inhumanity. Judging by the sentence, it would have seem that Fauzan Omar’s artwork isinstrumentalism whereby the work of an art is measured by its capacity to change human behaviourin public and visible ways. In this case, Omar was trying to emphasize the danger of haze that couldeffect the human life and what humans can do to prevent any harm from happening.
The artwork above is called The Large Bathers. The artist who drewthis is a famous post-impressionist French painter name Paul Cezanne. He issuperior in various painting style which has greatly affected the 20thabstract art. Paul Cezanne’s painting from the last few decades have creatednew ideal for the development of modern art. Working calmly and quietly, Paultransformed the agitated power of his earlier years into the creating of aillustrated language that would go on to shock nearly every essential phase ofthe 20th century art.Paul Cezanne’s painting from the 1860’s is personal, bearing verylittle image to the artist’s mature and more significant style. An incredibleattitude of Cezanne’s painting style in the 1860’s is the sense of focus andsheer will into his work.
Although his early work seems scrabble andquestionable in comparison to the artist’s later expressions, they nonethelessexpose a deep extent of feeling. Each painting seems ready to erupt beyond itsrestriction and exterior. In addition, each seems to be a perception of anartist who would either be a maniac or a genius. The world will possibly willnever know, as Paul Cezanne’s true character was anonymous to many, if not all,of his time. Even with all of the oppositions from either family or friends, PaulCezanne did receive encouragement from Pisarro, who was a Danish-Frenchimpressionist and a few other impressionists from the 1860’s and enjoyed theunusual compliment from them.
Paul Cezanne was affected by a number of things when creating TheLarge Bathers. Firstly, Cezanne had spent his early years in Paris at theLouvre museum, copying the painting of the great masters during his time. Thefigures of the nudes were all created in Cezanne’s imagination, because hepersonally said that it took far more time to work with real life models. Description:At the end of Paul Cezanne’s career, he created a few series ofbathers artwork. The Large Bathers is being called that way because it wasCezanne’s biggest composition in the series, moreover it is also the lastpainting to be produced.When producing The Large Bathers Cezanne was trying to create apiece of art that would be endless. Cezanne did not follow popular paintingtrends and felt no burden in confronting the nineteenth century approach.
The Large Bathers, is the largest artwork produced by Paul Cezanneand because it is also the most explicit in aspect, it has been often set as anexample of his ideal composition and his recovery of classic artwork after itscollapse during the nineteenth century back then.Some of critics has describe the women in the Large Bathers asmythical beings in the middle of nature. The trees are acting as their arenaand the figures in the background are sort of looking at their movement.
Thereis a noticeable triangle shape that forces the viewers to focus on the lake andthe small figures in the background. Even though the movement in the picturethere is an impression of harmony among the bathers. The artwork looks like itis trying to lure viewers to take a curious peek into their private world.Paul Cezanne’s scenery, with its serenity lake and what seems to bea church tower is not really a precise representation of a real suburb.
PaulCezanne has mention that he created this image using his imagination anddrawings from nature but he intend to figure it out and paint more than whatwas on the exterior.Paul Cezanne has prepared a number of practice artwork before hestarted on working the Large Bathers. He analysed on how he wanted the figuresto relate with each other and his previous pieces show that the women mesh witheach other in different ways.Even though a lot of people most critics think that the LargeBathers Is in an unpolished state, The Large Bathers is still considered one ofa masterpiece of modern art and has made a scene in television shows as of thebest compositions of all time.
Analysis: The Large Bathers(ii)The Large Bathers is surrounded by trees on both side of them. Eachpersons body is bent inward, kind of forming a triangular shape andconstructing the lake. Cezanne intentionally did this to keep his nudes incalculated spaces. For this painting there are at least twenty practicecompositions of the various bathers and their wavering poses. Some of the womenkneel, stand or sit, almost in a proportional formation, creating a few certaintriangles withing the larger triangle of trees. They are confined within thetrees just like an altar is confined within a church.
The roof of a churchcould provide space, but in Paul Cezanne’s Large Bathers it is nature’s roof,the trees. The women seems to be preparing a campfire or performing an ancientritual, but we cant really tell what they do. A river and two chunk of brownearth run horizontally, depicting true-to-life distance.
Further behind, treesand the church kind of points upward. The Large Bathers(iii)Usually a church is at the highest point of a place, but in thisartwork it is at the centre of the composition and here it has succumb tonature. Notice that in the background that the shape of the church and thetrees are seemingly same. The foreground trees which cage the women, doesn’tjoin at the top, and the middle tree in the far sort of points to an opening,very expressive of the higher ascension to the celestial world.
The church iswithin the artwork and a part of this custom space where the women kind ofplays a role of shamans surrounding and acting out a ritual, but not really themeans to an end. Trees for example have kind of replace the church as theasylum and the vessel to carry them to become deity. The Large Bathers(iv)In the artwork above there is a woman sort of pointing towards thewater where there is a figure that looks like a swimmer, that is one of thedetail too calculated to be ignored and certainly something Paul Cezanne wishedto point out. The artwork itself may suggest death, as the artist knew that itwas almost his time to end.
According to research, in Greek and Etrusan’spaintings, where there is swimmers diving into water are thought to representthat it is diving into the afterlife, although it is not certain that Cezannewas familiar with those type of paintings. Far beyond the swimmer, there aretwo mysterious figure at the other side. When we are looking at the mainartwork, we can sort of see that two or three women in the right maybe divingin soon. Whereas the other women are making preparations, in naked for theireventual transformation, the passing from the earth to the afterlife. Noticethat there is a sense of peace and harmony which make me think that PaulCezanne must have been at peace when he died. Figure (v)For the colour palette Cezanne has used light and dark blues, with acombination of brownish and bright white colours to create a sunny and cloudysky that appears to reach down the small suburb. The trunk of trees has beenshaped with golden honey and oak brown trees.
Each of the woman’s skin colourhas been complimented with a comb of chestnut brown hair and areas that havenot been worked on, which represents where the light reflects of their skin,are bright white. There are also shadow of blue and gray that are intelligentlymixed with their skin. The shades help to give the skin depth and createcurves, for example around the chest. The Large Bathers is a well-lit piece.
The bathers are brighten upfrom the right side of the painting, which depicts the small amount of lightthat is hitting the bathers on the right. The bather who is laying down hassort of a light hitting the elbow of her left arm and the underside of thethigh. However, the nude on the left side of the painting, who is fullyspanning out in front of the lake, is entirely engulf by white light. Both thebather’s torso and leg are radiant, almost as though Cezanne has intentionallyleft his painting unfinished.The tone and mood set by Paul Cezanne for this painting Ismysterious.
Moreover, this mysterious tone is being puzzled by the figureswimming in the lake. The seemingly calm waters have been disturbed by theripples.Cezanne likes used short, hatched brushstrokes to help ensuresurface harmony in his artwork as well as to model individual masses and spacesas they themselves produced out of paint. In creating the Large Bathers, PaulCezanne use an obvious brush stroke that gave his work a seemingly unfinishedpainting and was not afraid to leave the footsteps of his working patterns onhis artwork. In the Large Bathers Cezanne used thick of paint on his brush tocreate a harmony of blue and green colours. InterpretationsCezanne’s work is a form of research.
In a 1889 letter he says,talking about his working in isolation: “I had decided to work in silence tillthe day I would have been able to back my attempts theoretically.”In other words, he’s trying to reconsider the role of the artist in the modernworld and wants to reach to that through his artwork, like how a scientistwould formulate a theory after doing his (or her) research.In fact, he’s an “impressionist” only in that sense.
Visual perception for himis not the object of his study, but an analytical tool to reach a new form ofexpression. A new form of classicism, in another words.Paul Cezanne was one of the most important of modern painters. After him,modern art splits in two great currents: the analytical branch, where he camefrom, and the expressionist current, which we can say came from Van Gogh.It is clear that most of Paul Cezanne’s artwork is experimentation,Cezanne was trying to make Impressionism something stable or sturdy and longerlasting like the arts in the museums. Cezanne was trying to use large canvasesand appearing at his own way of depicting masses in space. So perhaps ratherthan thinking it a finished or unfinished artwork in the most typical way, itcan be though in a way weather or not the artwork has achieve itsexperimentational idea by Cezanne.The Bathers who seemingly looks like goddess, if it is compare withthe rest of his artwork, Cezanne generally intended to walk away from thewestern desire to see any female women naked as a goddess, instead Cezanne washoping to paint women as realistically and objectively, they are mostly paintedin the same way as the physical objects of Cezannes still-life artworks.
One ofthe compositions, the triangles that has been noticed easily might suggest thatthey are place on some kind of pedestal, before us as divine being or deity. The artist meant to leave an unresolved contrast between the paintedartwork and the distort drawn, expressionless faces on the bathers and thepoint of the painting is to deepen the mystery. Judgement:’An excellent art could be ugly’. The Large Bathers produced by PaulCezanne has impact the representation of the nude more than any other artworksince the High Renaissance, where Titan and Giorgione has already set thestandard of how figures should be shown in an artwork.
The new type of artworkthat Cezanne has created has persevere for over a century, affecting not onlythe illustration of the human figure but also few different sytles for examplefauvism, cubism and organic abstraction.The luxuriance of Cezanne’s legacy was extracted from the complexityof his techniques, which combines elements with access of solid modelling andallows the white ground of the artwork to hinder what is represented on it.This created a noticeable depictions of the human figure, where the faces, shapesand sizes of the body parts are clearly distorted.
Unfinished, emotionless, expressionless, and in comparison to theharmony that had define most earlier paintings of Cezanne’s bathers. The LargeBathers is the one with the most conflict. The most noticeable is thecomparison between the excitement of the nominal subject and the distortedfigures in the landscape. There are pressure and uncertainty among the figures.
The faces ofthe bathers are masklike, expressionless, and their bodies and in a weird form.The Large Bathers gave a sense of disturb rather than delight to viewers. Thereare also creepy passages in which the figure’s shoulders and arms of the farright bather are thrusting forward in a dislocated way. Out of all 14 bathers in the artwork, six are facing away.
Thisincreases the feeling of isolation andalso enhances the picture’s mystery by leading our mind to the blurry figuresfar from the shore, to the nearly invisible swimmer in the middle of the lake.Moreover, There is a mysterious figure emerging far from the bush at the farleft side of the painting.What seems to be an unfinished painting of Cezanne not only troubledhis contemporaries, but also his admirers. Because of the figures distortedexpression and disturbing surface, Paul Cezanne’s painting were consideredugly, at a time when ugliness was become a main issue in the controversy ofprogressive artworks.Nowadays, werealize how Paul Cezanne’s lack of finish has given an incredible suggestivespatial openness, one that reformulate the esthetics and structure of painting,as well as what seems to be a representation of the human figure.
