Andy
Warhol
who is
one of the most influential and well-known
artists around the world. Having made multi productions on a same object,
especially famous for paining Marilyn Monroe, he is a leading figure in
pop art. Warhol
started to paint famous objects or people: Marilyn
Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Dollar Signs, and Coca Cola
Bottles,
with the series of other paintings called “death and disaster.” However,
Warhol
painted Campbell’s Soup cans
not because they were
very special, but rather he painted them because he wanted
to paint nothing. In most of Warhol’s work, he often based on the
photographs,
and he made mass-produced objects, drawing on his extensive advertising
background. Most importantly, Warhol liked using Fauve colors, the
non-representational colors of Pop Art, or better known as artificial or
flash
colors. However, he did not know which colors were the right colors when
he was in a progress of painting.
Warhol was very fascinated with morbid concepts, but his art works
came out with very beautiful and
brilliant colors, especially in the images of Marilyn Monroe.
I Still can not figure out how to post my own piece:
ReplyDeleteJonathan Weinberg discusses the guilt painters have historically expressed in the use of photography in painting in his article, “Photographic Guilt: The Painter and the Camera.” Painters rarely feel the pangs of guilt from using photographs, or projections or digital prints to make paintings anymore. Artists like Brechtle certainly helped along the way, but really i think it is that the technology is available and artists want so badly to engage with the new materials and techniques. Not to mention the desire to make something before anyone else, or better than anyone else. These are the same drives that inspired artists to paint as realistically as possible. I think the painters guilt is a left over cultural bi-product of the Baudelarian way of thinking about photography and progress. Baudelaire said, “ Poetry and progress are two ambitious men that hate each other.” So first it is a historically substantiated feeling of selling-out and second is the way painting is taught in the majority of art schools. In trying to get the student to see properly or well enough to paint from life the student must stay away from the the printed photograph. a photograph as we all know flattens an image and the picture plane into one dimension. But painting is about being able to see in many dimensions simultaneously.
All this an Brechtle still us a reasonable artist. In the beginning Brectle mentions the mpst important thing, “Although Bectle later warmed me not to make too much of this sense of guilt, in the essay I ignore his advise. My intention is not to psychoanalyze him or to put him on trial; instead I wish to examine why tracing a photograph to make a painting might seem like a crime to many artists and critics.” There are new skills artists are expected to have now, like knowing when to use which form of technology, and for what. Airbrushing tools, that were once reserved only for the industrial complex, computers, cameras of all kinds, are expected and accassible tools and skills. Yet we are still kept aware that this is a rather new phenomanon because even our visiting artists this past semester have acknowledged a level of awkwardness. For example when Marilyn Minter visited mid semester she kept insisting that “Photorealism” was not what she was doing even though it is what she is most famous for. She harked on the enamel technique that is primarily used, calling it finger painting, and insisting on its inherent painterly-ness. All this to say, reading the Weinberg article made it feel like a real shift had occurred in the teaching of art just in the time I have been learning.
He did all of these because he wasn't sure of what colors to use? Hm. So these are like tests? That's interesting. I guess I never really ventured into why he chooses particular colors in those Marilyn paintings. Totally unrelated: his Mao painting in the modern wing is amaaazing. I always just thought a Warhol painting would be unimpressive, assuming that digital images did it justice. So wrong. You have to actually walk out of the gallery and look through the glass doors to take it all in, it's so huge.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to Warhol I am most fascinated by his use of repetition to creat a visual abstraction. Similar to the way one might say a word over and over again until it looses all meaning. A phenomenon called Semantic Saturation. I have found that this phenomenon is all of the internet these days in the for of the animated gif. A gif is easily understood and gotten at first but then something in it’s repetition keeps you from looking away and you continue to watch the loop. After watching a while the animation can become something entirely different or loose all meaning it began with.
ReplyDelete"Warhol painted Campbell’s Soup cans not because they were very special, but rather he painted them because he wanted to paint nothing."
ReplyDeleteI studied Warhol's printings in a contemporary art history class before. The most impressive one of his works to me was the mass produced images of Campbell's Soup and Coca Cola Bottles because the professor explained it that Warhol mocked the concept of social hierarchy by expressing that regardless of social status everybody drank the soup and drinks. Therefore, I doubt if your information about the printings of the soup and bottles is right.