Hope

Dec 2020

Oil on Canvas and black carboard hanging with fishing lines, 480mm X 600mm

I chose a photo that I took in a park, I chose it because the sky in that photo looks amazing. Aside from that, the time of the photo I took was at dawn, which made the sky colourful. Another reason why I chose this photo to be my background is that the dawn and the rising sun means hope. During times like now, COVID had made people's like hard and some of them had lost their jobs, even worse, some had lost their life. With the symbolic meaning of the rising sun, I believe that things are getting better as the day goes, and I am looking forward to the future.

This artwork not only presents hope but also express my feelings and my personal experience. I used a boy sitting on the mountain top to represent me, who go to classes using zoom and laptop. Learning knowledge from the screens. He might seem a bit lonely sitting there with nobody else, but from a different perspective the sun is shining bright behind him, things will be better and there will always be hopes.

People might wonder what does the black frame means? I use this frame to represent the screen, the portal between the world of the internet and the real world. Like myself right now, going to classes and learning knowledge mostly through the screens. Some of you may consider remote classes sucks and miserable, I do agree going back on campus is way better, but the idea I am expressing in this painting is not about to say I am lonely and everything sucks, I take being a remote student as a great chance, a chance I can have a unique experience. I present all those experiences with brushstrokes on the canvas.

In the beginning, I was planning to use black paint to draw the frame on the canvas. After I paint the base colour, I suddenly realize that this method will not work well since the oil takes forever to dry and drawing it with black paint will make a mess. When I was thinking about maybe I should remove it, a friend of mine offered me great advice, make the black frame separated from the canvas. So I decided to hang the black frame, which is made with black cardboard, with fishing lines stick on the ceiling and it turns out to be great. I also used some prespectives on the frame like the part of the frame is behind the montain and trees, so it would looks like one piece and have connections.