Exploring portraits and the use of colour and how it effect viewer
For my personal study I decided to explore my painting of portraits and the use of colour and how it affects the viewer using mainly a pop art style but also experiment with other styles. Most of the pop art artists heavily focus on use of bright colours and the characteristics of their work are themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books, pop art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. I will analyze different pop art artists assessing the reasons on their choice of colours and the techniques they have used. To analyze the portraits and the use of colour I am going to talk about artists such as Andy Warhol, Nikki Farquharson and Teesha Moore. I also would like to explain what the ‘Pop art’ is and what it means and why is it have become so popular.
Pop art focus on everyday objects rendered through an adoption of commercial art techniques. By doings this artist avail themselves of images and ideas culled from popular culture such as movies, comic books, advertising and especially television. It has also been defined by the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques that downplay the expressive hand of the artist. Pop art at times targeted a broad audience and often claimed to do so. It is commentary used style on contemporary society and culture, particularly consumerism, by using popular images and icons. In my project I have decided to analyse use of pop art style in different artists’ works.
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol was one of the most famous pop art artists which have been born in 1928 in Pittsburgh. Andy Warhol's pieces of work were not exactly profound. He developed his own style from, taking an image familiar to millions and presenting it frontally, without painterly qualities. In the early stages of his life he also made blotted line prints which I also want to have go on with to practise my technical skills. This technique involved pre ssing an ink drawing onto an absorbent paper. This technique involves using water-based colours made with pigments and water. The piece titled ‘happy butterfly day’ is an illustration of watercolour painting, in which Warhol made the outline of the butterflies using the blotted line technique. Example of the work?
Andy Warhol's pop art paintings are famous for their strange combinations of vivid colours and bold, tightly cropped images of celebrities and other notable images from the 20th century. The original paintings were created by applying quick coats of paint to a canvas, which was then covered with an image employing a printing press. The paintings were created in large quantities to simulate over saturation and commercialization. His style is reproducible in the digital format through a series of alterations to a regular photo.
Another popular technique Andy Warhol was using is called Silk-screening. He often combined painting and photography, by painting canvases silk screened with an image with bright abstract colours. Warhol started with over-sized photographs, which he then cut into stencil and glued the stencils onto the silk screen. Next, he would place the silk over the canvas, apply ink and roll a rubber squeegee over the silk and the stencil. The ink would penetrate the silk but not the portions with glue. This technique allowed Warhol to replicate the same image several times. Warhol describes this technique as “quick, simple and chancy”. I want to use both of these techniques for the portraits I am going to create.
You can’t see any parts of her clothing, because of the tight crop of the painting, however she appears to be wearing a garment that ties behind her neck. Her hair is short, yet falls close to her head below her ears. It is