Style 2

A Similar Style to Zhiyong Jing

Zhiyong's art is often a massive landscape or background with a small yet critically detailed foreground and his backgrounds often have an endless feeling to them. The foreground's are where the full ability of Zhiyong's art reside as he paints miniscule and usually very dark or contrasting characters and scenes.

I have been following Zhiyong for 2ish years now instagram and I have used some of his works to inspire many of mine. In this particular painting I had an idea of a polar bear being dwarfed by an oil tanker and Zhiyong's style was the perfect one to mimic for this piece.

Process

Almost all of Zhiyong's pieces are composed of a wide expanding background, a massive detail in the foreground and then very small intricate details for the subject, that's what I was trying to do here. I wanted the polar bear to be the most detailed part of the composition with the ship being the most noticeable. I needed the ship to be a bold color, taking your attention immediately to it as I wanted to show the power and unrelentingness of oil tankers compared to the previously powerful polar bear and forces of nature. I didn't initially add people or the ice caps in the background, however, I added in the people for some scale and the ice caps to give some sense of place, so the iceberg that the polar bear is on isn't completely random. I didn't really know how to add age and wear and tear to the oil tanker so I used a combination of layers, watered-down paint as well as scraffito. Scraffito is not used by Zhiyong, however, I wanted to use it in this piece regardless.

Ideas

I had this idea of a polar bear in my head when I toured Bowdoin College (the polar bears) and I wanted to create something to do with polar bears and massive ships in some kind of arctic setting. The more I thought and sketched it out I felt it would create more of a narrative if the ship was an oil tanker. This would kind of play with the idea of power, as a polar bear by itself is an immensely powerful beast who could easily shred a human into pieces, however paired against an oil tanker its really not much of a threat at all. This gives the humans on top of the ship in the top right much more power, gained in an unfair way; hence the name An Example of an Unfair Power Dynamic. The flamingo was added to show how ludicrously unaware the oil company is, why would someone ever bring a flamingo to the arctic?