Green Heritage Artwork
Botanical Portraits of Local Flora
In 2012 not long after my return to Malaysia in 2010, I started an initiative called Johor Green. It was a response to the rapid urbanisation of my hometown Johor Bahru which was impacting the city’s green heritage. My first step was to create 20 artworks - portraits of locally significant flora (see Glossary here) and to develop a narrative about this initiative called Green Heritage.
There is no indigenous local heritage of wall art although there is a rich history of carving in this Nusantara region. I decided that a possible, naturally derived expression for wall art could be drawn from Japanese style prints made with carved woodblocks. I researched the composition and style of Japanese wood block prints that featured botanical artwork as an important subcategory.
In photoshop, I created simple graphic outlines filled with watery inked colours. For the inked colours I looked to Chinese paintings where flowers, gardens and botanicals were also a category of interest for artists. Composition, cropping of views were certainly osmosed into Japanese woodblock prints and later emulated by European impressionist painters.
Since this also had to fit into a sustainability narrative, I made the prints a little more vibrant to register on recycled kraft paper that they would be printed on. The prints were developed in 4 colour driven sets : Pink/Red, Yellow/Orange, Blue and Green totalling 20 artworks.
Gallery
The artwork was developed with the intent to bring it to events to spur conversation around our diminishing appreciation of local flora. They were used to illustrate talks at local events like Rotary Club meetings and brought to local Arts & Craft events to be sold as greeting cards and wall posters. whilst engaging with locals and visitors to the city about our botanic heritage.
In 2014 a team from from Iskandar Malaysia brought a full set of our posters to present as a gift to the Mayor of Kyoto, Japan.
Press
Reliving Johor’s Green Heritage by Peggy Loh New Straits Times