Project: Blue Fire

Since entering my third year on my Fine Art degree course, I have picked up more methods of creating art through experimentation, one of which involving an unlikely combination of pen, ink and hairspray. The process leaves the initial drawn image distorted and denotes degradation amongst other things. I have directed my intentions to a specific topic within war, a topic which I have addressed before, the Depleted Uranium area. This subject is rarely known of, and holds a very significant amount of irony behind all the media and how the world thinks the U.S. fights in ‘war’.

I have researched this topic earlier in this file, under the Depleted Uranium (5.4 Billion Years In the Making) series and will shortly be pinpointing more events along this subject to hopefully achieve more striking effects with my work.

The only large piece of work I have created this year is ‘Project Blue Fire’, a 7ft x 6ft Canvas. The initial image of the Iraq burning oil fields with a tank in the foreground was drawn on in marker pen. This picture had been edited in Photoshop first and was purely black and white. My next step was to apply a wash of blue ink across the entire canvas, this was to make sure that no part of the canvas was to be left white, nothing in this story was pure – all of it had been tainted. We are told that it has been covered in blue ink and you choose to believe it so, even though you did not see me do it, such is the likeness of the veil of the U.S. media and how the story of the war is tainted towards their advantage before laid before the public.

What I want to highlight is still the brutality and realness of Depleted Uranium and at the same time touch on how stories can be changed and twisted to virtually ‘make up’ another story that differs dramatically from the truth – the true stories never really become public knowledge, and it has never been so evident around the topic of Depleted Uranium bullets.