Andy Warhol and His Paintings

Whorl’s Flowers, 1967, silkscreen on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, is included in the exhibition. Flowers were quite an inspiration for Warhol time and again. “Flowers in art and culture have been ubiquitous since the beginning of recorded art history,” says Smith. “The floral theme wasn’t any more exhausted when Warhol was doing it than when 17th-century Dutch painters or the Impressionists were. But Warhol was sly; he was always playing with traditional art historical themes” (Frey). Andy Warhol, 1925-1987, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker.
Warhol is famous for art that defied all standard definitions of ‘art’. He was well known for mass-producing the hallmarks of his work. He called his studio The Factory and insisted on the appropriateness of others producing his work, for which he used mainly photographs, often news photographs, which he printed in multiples by the silk screening process. Silk screening is a method of printing on a porous fabric, the portion of the design to be reproduced is left unblocked on the screen; than the screen is placed above the surface to be printed on, than the paint, or dye, is forced through the screen.
Warhol appropriated most of his images and repeated these images numerous times; Warhol had a fascination with repetition, perhaps created by our compulsion to find an exception or rogue element in the composition. “Warhol was relentlessly detached, cool, and superficial: ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol Just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There is nothing behind it,’ he said” (Frazier 709). “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.

I like boring things. I like things to be exactly the same over and over again. Eve been quoted a lot as saying, ‘l like boring things. ‘ Well, I said it and I meant it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not bored by them. Of course, what I think is boring must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different.
But I’m Just the opposite: if I’m going to sit ND watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don’t want it to be essentially the same?I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel” (Stiles 340). Andy Warhol had a legendary and lucrative artistic career from the early sass through 1986; some early key works are included in landmark series such as Campbell Soup, Marilyn, Jackie, Mao, Elvis, Flowers, Disaster, and Self-portraits.
Flower’s is considered to be one of Whorl’s most significant of his later works. Employing mass-production techniques to create works, Warhol erased traditional distinctions between fine art and popular culture, subtly blurring the boundaries of mass art and high culture with his striking appropriations. His choice of subjects tapped into important themes: power, fame, and tragedy. With an unerring eye for iconic images, from common objects to celebrities and disasters, Warhol produced a lasting oeuvre that captured the essence of American culture” (Traditional Fine Art Online).
Warhol believed in painting everyday ‘boring objects, but what do boring objects eve to do with Pop Art? Roy Liechtenstein was once asked what Pop Art was, “the use of commercial art as a subject matter in painting, I suppose. It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it?everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag, everybody was accustomed to this. The one thing everyone hated was commercial art; apparently they didn’t hate that enough either” (Stiles 337). For example, Coke was one of these objects that Warhol produced quite a bit.
Coke is something that very American can relate too, and this is what made Warhol enjoy painting the product so much. “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and Just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz