by aina tasso

The lake on the left side of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, the painting shows a scene of chaos, drowning, and doom. I used Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa or The Great Wave, to show the tumultuous waters that would have hit the ship from the first scene in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Hokusai’s image also features ships that are being overtaken by the wave. I added the ship from a Chinese painting showing sea junk to be the ship from The Tempest. Sea junk was painted by a Chinese artist to encapsulate part of daily life in China. Although the original person on board is covered by another painting I added on top. John Senek’s A New Map of The World From The Latest Observations…Most Humbly Inscribed to His Royal Highness George Prince of Wales serves as a gift to an elite, a prince. I cut off part of the top, which included images of people lounging, to represent the elite that were on board the ship in The Tempest. While they were occupied with maintaining the social hierarchy that existed on land, the Boatswain wanted to survive. Arnold Böklin’s In the Sea depicts a scene of lust between mythical creatures. Lust was not something that would have been socially acceptable in the society The Tempest elites lived in. I put the people in this scene in the water to represent the elite leaving behind the people who they thought were “less than” to fend for themselves in the water. To add on to this scene of chaos, I added Vasily Kandinsky’s Improvisation No. 30 (Canons). The painting features a smoking cannon, leaning buildings, and people. I used the blue part to show more violent movements of water as a person at the top was watching the whole scene play out below. Kandinsky said that “the presence of cannons in the picture could probably be explained by the constant war talk that has been going on throughout the year.” This idea reminded me of the violence which was discussed in my notes from Image 1. This person could be interpreted as a god-like figure watching how its creations were fighting each other and leaving each other to die. This collage also allows for other parts of Bosch’s painting to show. For example, the trumpet that splices the collage in half shows the arms and the top of the head of a person who is either getting sucked in or is looking to get out. Either way, the collage emphasizes the portrayal of the human end that is largely drawn in this darker side of the painting.