Andy Warhol was born in 1928 in Pittsburg Pennsylvania to a poor family of which his parents were Slovakian immigrants. Andy grew up during the great depression in a slum ghetto, in this time Pittsburg was an industrial steel making city. Andy was helping bringing about the new art style of Pop Art in the 1950s. His work is bold and colourful, often taking a familiar image and repeating it adding colour. His art explored the themes of, celebrities, identity, money, death, and time. He really wanted to make money and become famous, but also to mass produce art so it would be affordable for the public. He wanted people to be experimental in art and find new interesting ways of doing it.
Andy’s process is that he would project a source image onto a canvas, trace it with pencil and apply paint. He also used the photographic silk screen printing process. He often used famous people that were easily recognisable as the subject of his work. Repeated images were creative activities included in his work. To make his artwork, Andy Warhol needed to be able to draw, stencil, paint, and do screen printing, photography, and film making. He would also need skills like, marketing, business, and communications. The theme of celebrities inspired him to use materials like photographs of famous people, and then to create something new with them by adding colour.
Warhols work does not convey feelings about nature, rather focuses on famous people or commercial items, even everyday objects like cans of soup. His mood when he created was likely lighthearted and fun because he didn’t care if people didn’t like his works. He also worked quickly to get the job done. His works are very loud, happy, energising, chaotic and colourful.
The content of his work was made for an audience of the masses of common people. He didn’t make art just for the rich. The way you can tell the time period of his art is by looking at the people and brand names used as the main object of his painting. You would know that it had to be in a time after a certain person was born, or a certain product was made. For example, after Marilyn Monroe, and after Brillo products were made. Warhol was considered politically neutral, and I don’t think he had a major social comment behind his work because he once famously said “Art is anything you can get away with.”
I do not like the work of Andy Warhol because it seems like it doesn't take much skill to just draw or paint on top of a photograph. It does inspire me to think that one could still make a lot of money from their artwork, even if their skill is low. My mood, when I look at Warhols work, does not change, except that I can feel mad at others' cheap success. Some artists work very hard and produce skilled work and yet go unrecognised.
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