I painted these five images with the intention of showing my interpretation of how I understood the history of colonization. The combination of all five paintings is intended to show the progression of a world untouched by the outside world into an entirely different entity.
The world before colonization, as represented by the first two paintings, was self sustaining and able to exist without the corruption of a colonizers perspective on how life should be experienced. The colors I chose to use here were meant to represent the lush green landscapes of a land free from industrialization, one with an expanse of water to represent the natural resources of the self sustained country. Here the colors are more free flowing and there is no rigid expectation of how the colors were meant to come together, and I didn’t do much to manipulate where the colors flowed (a way to not colonize the paint in a way).
The third image is meant to represent the beginning of outside powers and their influx into indigenous lands, reforming and imposing their country’s values and beliefs on the inhabitants. In this painting I chose to use more variations of colors and techniques to blend and combine the paint together with the goal of expressing the concept of the blurring of where a countries original beliefs begin and where the colonizers imposed way of looking at the world comes into play. With this specific painting I used a combination of finger blending the paints and tapping at the canvas to create imperfections in how the colors came together so that no one color had any more presence than the others.
The fourth painting is meant to convey that there is almost nowhere in this world that can claim to be untouched and untainted by the western worlds ideas and beliefs about concepts like gender, race, what people do and do not deserve, and so on. This painting is was a bit darker to create and more sad to be completely honest. When choosing the colors to put in this piece, I thought that incorporating the darker shade of brown with the overpowering shade of red would convey the imposition of western ideologies on unsuspecting bodies of people. Even in the small section of green and blue there are still small pockets where there is the presence of another color giving way to the fact that even in countries that are seemingly detached from the western world, we as colonizers still impose our own values upon them even without having direct contact.
The fifth painting is more of a futuristic interpretation of where I believe the world is heading. There are mixtures if different groups (represented by the different colors), with some still holding onto their original shades, or their country’s personal distinctive qualities, but none of the lands would be anything like how they were prior to outside influence. This image serves the purpose of expressing that in order to get back to a world free from western thoughts, beliefs, and practices, there needs to be a lot of structural work done.
