I did some research on Andy Warhol to follow up the resemblance I recognized to my experiments for Assignment 5, where I combined charcoal with watercolours. I think I remembered some of his silkscreen portraits. Looking up his works on wikiarts, I found quite a few that were in that style of grayscale photos colorized with bright colours and no gradations. There were portraits but also images of flowers as well as seemingly arbitrary everyday subjects like shoes. I felt quite close to this idea of seeing the interest in everyday items that surround us and are normally taken for granted and receive no attention. I guess this informed some of my own subject choices, for example when I painted a pair of shoes in the coloured grounds project. I think the research encouraged me to employ bold colours and simple shapes when I worked towards abstraction in Assignment 5.

Besides the silkscreen works, I discovered that Warhol also had made mixed media portraits, using collage and drawing. I’m including those of Albert Einstein and Mick Jagger. I find them quite fascinating in their combination of elements and also in their lightness and simplicity. As I’m now finished with the watercolour course, the inspiration will not become visible in this context anymore, but I’m quite sure that I’ll get back to this in my printmaking work and in painting/mixed media as well.

References

Images from Wikiart: http://www.wikiart.org/en/andy-warhol