For my development, I created an oil painting inspired by Salman Khoshroo. I really liked how expressive his work is; the use of streaks created by the palette knife cutting out features in his portraits and figurative paintings, really give his pieces dimension. The colours also really make his work stand out, the use of mostly primary colours are overall dynamic and create a flow to his work.
An idea came to mind when observing his work; the colours he used aren't all too blended so I thought what if I gave them meaning? My subject matter focusses on the viewpoint of racism and by the end of this assignment I find myself leaning more towards the subject of Asian hate. This matter is very important to me not just for the fight for human rights but as I come from an Asian background myself. My intention behind this piece was to depict an anonymous figure with no distinct facial features and then have each colour represent a percentage of a statistic graph taken from reports of different natures of Asian hate crimes. As for historical context, I thought about how art by Leonardo de Vinci and Micheal Angelo whitewash figures such as Jesus in their likeness; they are changing historically accuracy through this. By creating a painting segmenting the colour according to this statistic graph, I am changing the skin tone all together but by representing discrimination towards my subject matter. For example, the graph I took reference from shows the highest percentage of hate was shown to be 'Verbal Abuse' at 70.9% which is why the majority of my painting is covered in red as this colour represents this statistic (see key below). Key: - Verbal Harassment = 70.9% in Red - Shunning = 21.4% in Blue - Physical Assault = 8.7% in Yellow - Coughed/spat on = 6.4% in Green - Workplace discrimination or refusal of service = 8% in White |