Traffic in the eye of a DL artist

'Falling Down' by Nancy, DL student, Hurstville college

My name is Nancy.  I used to study Fine Arts when I was at university. In the first 2 years of my studies I did a series of art work about the traffic problem in China.  I always thought the main problem that caused traffic jams was bad traffic facilities and imperfect traffic laws.  Later, however, I realised that the main problem could be people themselves.

Then I did an oil painting named Falling Down.  The size of the artwork is 100cm x 80cm which took me 3 weeks to finish . The picture describes a traffic accident. The black background of this painting makes the traffic accident seem like it happened at night. In the middle of the picture, many people jump off one side of an overloaded old grey truck which makes the trunk fall down soon.  As it shows in the picture, some of them have already fallen down on the ground.  Although you can`t see their faces you can imagine from their clothes that they could be some blue-collar workers, farmers or builders.

The main reason that I did this art work was to try and remind people of the importance of observing traffic rules.  I brushed the colour of the background very quickly and made the background rough and uneven everywhere to create the feeling of people being in a rush when you see it. I deliberately left people`s faces blank to show that the people in the picture could be any of us. Obviously, it is illegal for such a huge number of people to be on one truck, but it sometimes happens in China. Even though everyone knows that it`s very dangerous to jump off the truck, some will still do it.  However, the lame excuse that people use to explain why they don’t obey the traffic laws is that they are in a hurry. 

In my opinion, people who do not obey the traffic rules present the biggest traffic problem.

Congratulations to Nancy on such a wonderful and meaningful piece of art and thanks to her teacher Marina for sharing it.

This week is Road Rules Awareness Week in NSW.  What are the top 10 misunderstood road rules?  
Click here to watch the videos and learn about these rules.  

For discussion:

• Which rule do you need to learn more about?
• Nancy thinks that people's bad habits of breaking traffic rules contribute to accidents.  Do you agree that people have a big part to play in causing traffic problems and accidents?  Why/why not?
• What solutions could you suggest to solving traffic problems?

We'd love to hear your comments below.