by Shiona Herbert
Let's take a look at another artist whose creative genius can be traced right back to a chapter of life when they were socially isolated from others.
Pop Artist Andy Warhol created paintings of popular, frequently consumed products such as Coca Cola bottles, Campbell’s soup cans as well as sculptures of soapboxes and cornflakes packaging. Campbell’s soup and Coca Cola were prominent in Andy’s life (he enjoyed eating and drinking them). These artworks encouraged us to look at everyday items in a whole new light.
As an adult, Andy enjoyed a busy schedule of working with glamorous celebrities–many of them are featured in Warhol’s Pop Art portraits. But his life wasn’t always so hectic or so social.
Warhol was born in Pittsburgh just prior to the Depression. He had two older brothers who were active and outgoing. Andy, however, was a sickly child who spent months at a time confined to home recovering from illness and anxiety from being teased at school.
While recovering at home, Andy’s mother kept him engaged through art projects such as collage and teaching him how to trace and draw. Something else Andy occupied his time with was reading comics & glamour magazines and writing to movie studios requesting personalized photos of Hollywood stars. These prized possessions were carefully pasted into a cardboard scrapbook and it led to a life-long fascination with celebrity and glamour.
After studying art at college, Warhol went on to become a sought-after illustrator for fashion magazines like Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, and Glamour. He also created artworks for window displays and product advertising. During this time, Warhol developed a hand printing technique where he traced an existing image with ink and then blotted it onto another piece of paper. This allowed him to repeat an image over and over again and it gave his work a distinctive look and feel.
This technique of repetition combined with his favorite subject matters: celebrity and glamour, can be seen in one of Warhol’s most iconic paintings: Marilyn Diptych, 1962, which was made weeks after the star’s death.
The diptych is a whopping 6.5’ x 9.5’ canvas made up of 50 repeated silk screen portraits of one of Hollywood’s most famous actresses: Marilyn Monroe. The image is taken from a Hollywood publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara which Monroe starred in.
The left-hand side of the painting shows repeated images of brightly colored portraits. All 25 colored images are clean and precise, even though they are not exactly alike. The 25 black and silver images of Marilyn on the right-hand side are murky and degraded. They are printed in a fashion by which they fade away across the canvas.
These two different aspects are said to be an observation of Monroe’s life: the brightly painted side reflects her vivacious beauty and presence in the media, while the black and silver section is a response to her death and how fame is always destined to fade away.
Look carefully at the diptych. You’ll find the silver and black side, (the less perfect side), generates more intrigue about the art. The great thing is that these imperfect images were created on purpose. Warhol as an artist revealed that he found the mistakes and the ugly parts of art far more interesting than perfectly composed art.
“When you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up something.”
This is really inspiring for those of us who are encouraging children to create art. It reveals that art doesn’t have to be perfect.
Even Warhol says so!
The action of creating art is just as important as the final work created. Warhol’s process of repeating an image over and over again became his artistic modus of operandi. In fact, Andy went on to make another 12 portraits of Monroe. Ironically, these have become as famous as the actress was herself.
We now know that those formative years in which Warhol was isolated at home, gave him time to practice and experiment with artistic ideas which had a powerful impact on his later work as an artist. So, as you continue to spend time at home, you can take inspiration from Warhol and engage with creativity!
Encourage your kids to try new things and explore the art supplies you have on hand… invite them to use their materials in new ways to create exciting and unexpected results in their art.
Now It’s Your Turn!
Let’s make our own diptych that combines bright, clean-line prints with messy, ‘perfectly wrong’ black and white prints.
Fold a piece of paper in half.
Open it up and paint one side with light colored paint. Leave the other half white.
Collect some ink stamps and two ink pads- one color and one black (if you don’t have these materials handy, you can easily substitute cookie cutters for stamps and slightly watered down paint on paper plates to use instead of ink).
Press the ink stamp into the colored ink and press down clean and firm onto the painted side of the paper. Reload the ink for each image press.
Let it dry and clean off your ink stamp.
Press the clean ink stamp into the black ink pad and press it over and over again onto the white side of the paper; without reloading any ink.
Let the stamp ink get lighter each time. Feel comfortable with being messy and ‘exactly wrong’ with the stamping this time. (Even move the stamp to the side a bit when you’ve pressed it down to give a ‘blurred’ stamp impression.)
Allow it to dry.
Voila – you have a Warhol inspired diptych where the ‘mistakes’ are just as appealing as the clean, exact, impressions.
Learn more about Warhol and create another print here!
