Referencing a photograph I took in South Korea a few years ago before Covid-19, I made an acrylic painting titled Busan, South Korea. A lone plastic chair resides on the typically crowded tourist spot of the Busan shore, looking over the vibrant sand and an overbearing cityscape.

After Part A, I wanted to explore something completely different to the cathartic nature and scribbliness that came out of using multiple mediums (pencils, markers, paint). Looking at Cecily Brown and Richard Diebenkorn, the different stages of my work were inspired by these two artists. Ultimately, Diebenkorn’s influence dominated my final artwork, with the use of stark, defined colour, and the simplification of a landscape. To capture a sense of loneliness, I omitted the crowd that was in my reference image and replaced it with a plastic chair because I wanted to express the makeshift, fleeting nature of a moment balancing between tranquillity and loneliness.

Layering was a big part of painting this piece - as I continued to add colour to the canvas, I tried to avoid blending or washing my paintbrush entirely, so that the strokes would have multiple colours in one section. Using a dry brush and continually layering, I wanted the sky to have the most texture, since it would be the lightest colour on the canvas. The hints of red in both the blue sky and the yellow sand peaking through are some of my favourite parts of the work.