Turbulent Peace: A Junior Self-Portrait Diptych by Anna Wang (2013)

The place I describe in my poem is a serene mountain-top which transported me to a peace of mind. Through images of this specific wilderness my poem demonstrates that I have a calm, thoughtful side and a violent, wild, passionate side; that place brought peace between them. The red flowers symbolize passion, while the white gun against the black symbolizes stoicism and pensiveness, together they create my version of a photo taken in the 70s of a woman putting flowers in soldiers’ guns. However, my gun drawing is upright and is acting as a sort of vase for the real flowers pinned to the wall.

There was physically a tumbling, roaring mountain river, a violent and terrifying waterfall, and whirling mountain winds in the place from my poem. The water nearly erupting from the bowl represents the turbulence of the physical place I describe in the poem. It also, however, symbolizes the turbulence of my thoughts and racing emotions when I remember such a place and the effects it still has on my mind and personality. I chose to use a photo of water to capture movement in one moment, such as the poem captured all of the movement that took over my mind in one moment of standing above a cliff in the mountains.

I chose to leave the photo of the water a warm sepia tone to correspond with the warm, brown tones in the gun photo and I used the major link of colour to create harmony between the two halves of the diptych. Along that note, both the gun and the main ‘wave’ of water are off centered in the photos to draw the viewer in and to make the composition of the final piece flow, and appear more interesting. The movement of the water leads your eye around and to the edge of the round bowl, which then brings it back. Similarly, the lines of the gun lead up to bright red flower and back around to the right-hand picture. Both sides of the diptych work together because left picture has no movement, in fact the shadow of the flower demonstrates to the viewer how frozen and still it is, which contrasts with the abundance of movement in the picture on the right, which has swirling water and round curving shapes which oppose the geometric, stark, bold lines of the gun and flower stem. I chose to juxtapose a sort of mechanical, geometric subject with a loose organic form; the water in the bowl.