STAR WARS in painting - the Pandawan by Lucie LLONG

STAR WARS: The interstellar epic of the Pandawan by Lucie LLONG

POP ART & Star Wars Inspiration

I got fascinated by POP ART in 2005 during a visit to an exhibition dedicated to Andy WARHOL at the cultural center in Lyon. The simplicity of the strokes contrasts with the intensity of the colors in his paintings.

This surprising and viscerally offbeat movement encourages a deviant interpretation of the message or subject. I aimed to create, in this new painting, combinations of surprising and unusual ideas.

Art is not about coming up with new ideas, but about interpreting the ideas that have always surrounded us.
George Lucas

The mythe Star Wars

Like sports, cinema has its myths, and Star Wars is certainly one of them. If Star Wars brilliantly revolutionized science fiction films at its time, more than 40 years after the release of the first episode, the saga has not aged—unlike its characters, human or otherwise, who age and are replaced by new heroes. This is precisely the strength of the series: whether good or evil (or both), their personalities are complex, endearing, often tormented by the ambivalences of our world, between good and evil, love and hate, stubbornness and insight^.

Whole generations have grown up under the influence of STAR WARS, Master Yoda’s language errors (showing that the Force does not protect against linguistic difficulties), and his legendary lines, to name but the most famous: ‘May the force be with you’.

Pandawan, the new apprentice after the chimpanzee

After the chimpanzee, here comes the panda, and if the phonetic similarity between ‘padawan’ and ‘pandawan’ is evident, it all started from the idea of an animal-inspired POPART series. Rather than realism, I wanted to bring a touch of freshness tinged with humor and benevolent provocation to this new painting series. However, there is another interpretation of this tableau, that of a peaceful and harmless species struggling for its survival, and one that we must protect.

Indeed, the panda is an emblematic species of our planet and a symbol of preservation for the animal cause (logo of WWF – World Wildlife Fund), as the species is both fascinating and facing extinction. The idea of transforming a panda into a benevolent and valiant Jedi fighting for the survival of its species and harmony among peoples immediately appealed to me. The contrast between the panda’s passivity, plumpness, and nonchalance, and its determination is one of the essential aspects of this painting that I thoroughly enjoyed creating.

A serie to complete

Other works will gradually complement this series of POPART-inspired pieces with other animals or characters deliberately taken out of their frame and context, to be discovered in the coming months.