Guinea-Bissau is a small country just to the north of Guinea in the west of Africa. It has a Portuguese colonial history that left a legacy of the language, although most people there speak one of many indigenous languages, or a common Kriol (Creole) which is a fusion of Portuguese with regional dialects that most people there can speak and understand. In fact, the Kriol is a complete language and they have books and documents written in it. In a youtube video the people were talking in Kriol and saying how they preferred this over the colonial era Portuguese. Another interesting fact about Guinea-Bissau is that they have have a burgeoning rice industry. Much of the land used to be Mangrove wetlands which were converted to rice paddies by clearing mangroves and building a system of dikes to retain fresh water. Unfortunately the loss of mangroves is causing coastal erosion and inundation with salty ocean water that spoils the land.
In the painting I depicted a rice paddy surrounded by an earthen dike surrounded by natural mangrove trees. Hints of the ocean are seen in the background. I got the idea from an old Japanese print showing a field of grass, called Chiryu station in the 53 stations series. Instead of depicting the flowing rice with black or green lines, I used a variety of colours to give it some pop. It's a great yellow colour in the background, I made it with yellow (PY154), yellow orange (PY110) and a touch of green (PG36).
World Inspired Landscapes: Guinea-Bissau, watercolour 10 x 11" cold press, February 2023 (No. 3368)
No comments:
Post a Comment