Andy Warhol

This post will be about Andy Warhol. Please see a video documentary explaining his works of art.

Overview Summary

Andy Warhol was a famous artist who was most famous for creating the well known pieces: 'Marilyn Diptych' and 'Campbell's Soup Cans' and films 'Chelsea Girls'. He was a leading figure in the pop art, advertisement industry and created the phrase '15 minutes of Fame'

and almost shot dead by a radical feminist which had an impact on his life and art pieces.

During his lifetime, Warhol created an art gallery at which he sold Campbell Soup Can art for $1500 a piece and singular signed cans for $6.50 each where he sold some of the most expensive paintings ever: 'Shot Sage Blue Marilyn' at $195 million which held the record for most expensive painting sold by an American Artist in an auction.

Warhol lived openly as a gay man and died at age 58 in New York City, 1987 from cardiac arrhythmia.

Early Life:

Andy Warhol was born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a child, Warhol suffered from a condition called St. Vitus dance that caused involuntary movements. Warhol would stay at home and read magazines and play with paper cut-outs as a result of the disease keeping him at home.

Throughout his life, St Vitus had an impact on his quality of life, keeping him bedridden and he had pigment issues that caused discolouration of his skin, leading to the nicknames “Spot” and “Andy the Red-nosed Warhola.” In response, Warhol used clothing, wigs, cosmetics, and plastic surgery to change the shape of his nose. His condition later had an impact on his art works with early paintings depicting a nose job, wigs, and pain relief for corns.

Fame: 1949

Warhol gained popularity from 1949 onwards with his work first appearing in the Glamour magazine where he illustrated a story called 'What is Success'. Some of his clients included Tiffany & Co., I. Miller Shoes, Fleming-Joffe, Bonwit Teller, Columbia Records, and Vogue.

He was known for his blotted-line ink drawings, using a process he developed in college and refined in the 1950s. Which combined drawing with basic printmaking and allowed Warhol to repeat an image and to create multiple illustrations along a similar theme as well as quickly change it to fit a client's request.

Works:

Warhol was a leading figure in the Pop Art movement. “The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do,” he once explained.

Warhol began painting in the late 1950s and received sudden notoriety in 1962, when he exhibited paintings of Campbell's Soup Cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap pad boxes. By 1963 he was mass-producing these purposely banal images of consumer goods by means of photographic silkscreen prints, and he then began printing endless variations of portraits of celebrities in garish colours.

Tate Modern:

Sexuality

Warhol self-published a large series of artist’s books in the 1950s. He would hold parties at Serendipity 3, a restaurant and ice cream parlor on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where his friends would help him hand colour his books. In 1956, he presented a solo exhibition at the Bodley Gallery called Studies for a Boy Book. These sketchbook drawings of portraits of young men and erotic portrayals of male nudes contrasted with the work of other contemporary gay artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

This is my mindmap with colour circles to show my intended colour schemes: of mostly blues and teals.

Below shows the process in which I used a threshold tool in Photoshop in order to create my artwork, I had difficulty adjusting it to a clear image of black and white as my black hair and pale skin blended in with my clothing that was also black and white. By using a threshold, it was easy to seperate colour from shades. However, I decided to use more of my own spin on the Warhol piece, which was to stack multiple layers of shades of the same colour to create shape and tone. This became time consuming and inaccurate as I moved further away from the face.

The next following 4 pieces of art are my response to Andy Warhol's art style. I took my own spin on them by highlighting details on the face in detail and instead of black, chose individual darker colours that suited the colour scheme more.

The one that looks the most similar to Warhol's art therefore is the yellow and black version.

In conclusion, my finished 'final' piece is the following blue one: to create the roundness of the face shape, I used different shades of blue, gradually getting darker and rounder shapes to convey the cheek structure. For the hair, I used sharper shapes of similar colour to show the darkness of the hair. However, the yellow version is the one closest to Warhol's artstyle. My least favourites are the green and pink versions as the colours clash quite a bit and I dislike some of the tones. I think it was my mistake to choose a picture where a lot of things were already black and white as it made seperating things in the threshold quite difficult. Otherwise, I am happy with the result.