Andy Warhol painted dollar bills, celebrities, brand name products, and images from newspaper clippings many of the latter were iconic images from headline stories of the decade. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand painted with paint drips.
Andy Warhol was a very successful commercial illustrator. These illustrations consisted mainly of 'blotted ink' drawings (or monoprints), a technique which he applied in much of his early art. Although many artists of this period worked in commercial art, most did so discreetly. Andy Warhol was so successful, however, that his profile as an illustrator seemed to undermine his efforts to be taken seriously as an artist.
In the early 1960s, Andy Warhol tried to exhibit some of his drawings using these techniques in a gallery, only to be turned down. He began to rethink the relationship between his commercial work and the rest of his art. Instead of treating these things as opposites, he merged them, and began to take commercial and popular culture more explicitly as his topic.
His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand painted with paint drips. Those drips emulated the style of successful abstract expressionists. Eventually, Andy Warhol pared his image vocabulary down to the icon itself to brand names, celebrities, dollar signs and removed all traces of the artist's 'hand' in the production of his paintings.
Andy Warhol began to make paintings of famous American products such as "Campbell's Soup Cans" from the Campbell Soup Company and Coca Cola, as well as paintings of celebrities. He founded 'The Factory', his studio, during these years, and gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians and underground celebrities. He switched to silkscreen prints, which he produced serially, seeking not only to make art of mass produced items but to mass produce the art itself. In declaring that he wanted to be 'a machine', and in minimizing the role of his own hand in the production of his work, Andy Warhol sparked a revolution in art his work quickly became very controversial, and popular.
Andy Warhol's work from this period revolves around American Popular Culture. He painted dollar bills, celebrities, brand name products, and images from newspaper clippings many of the latter were iconic images from headline stories of the decade. His subjects were instantly recognizable, and often had a mass appeal this aspect interested him most, and it unifies his paintings from this period. This quotation both expresses his affection for popular culture, and evidences an ambiguity of perspective that cuts across nearly all of the artist's statements about his own work. Please purchase on online http://www.etabletop.com
