Image Essay #11

ANDY WARHOL Warhol is best known for his silk-screen prints of packaged consumer products, everyday objects, such as Campbell's Soup Cans, poppy flowers, and the banana appearing on the cover of the rock music album The Velvet Underground and Nico , and also for his stylized portraits of twentieth-century celebrity icons, such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor.When he started painting, he wanted to find a target for himself. At the time Pop Art, as it was later named, was already an experimental form. Warhol turned to this new style where popular subjects could be part of the artist's vocabulary. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with added paint drips. He added these drips to give his paintings a seriousness by emulating the style of the abstract expressionists that were en vogue at the time. He wanted to be taken seriously or to sell his paintings.

Not only is Andy Warhol well-known for the elements he paints, but how he creates them. Warhol’s use of photo silkscreen is creative because it is a technique traditionally used for mass production for commercial purposes. Photo silkscreen is a printmaking technique that allowed Warhol to repeat images over and over. It contains many layers of rubber glaze and paint. Warhol used photo silkscreen to create some of his most famous works of art. On the website of http://webexhibits.org/colorart/marilyns.html, I listened to a tape recording of an interview with Andy Warhol. He says the reason why he uses artificial colors ( colors that are mixed and are not realistic to the element being painted) because he does not know how to paint realistically. He also says that he tries mixing a flesh tone, but never seems to get the right one. Warhol’s stylistic painting makes his artwork memorable and creative. He may not be the best realsitic painter, but he sure is the best pop culture painter.