Tiny sketchbook

Essay on Warhol

Some time ago when browsing Warhol on Pinterest an unusual painting caught my attention. It was strange and intriguing and it was nothing like Warhol. That was how I discovered Warhol’s Rorschach series.

In 1978, more than a decade after announcing his retirement from printmaking, Warhol returned to painting. The idea for the Rorschach paintings came from Jay Shriver, Warhol’s studio assistant who suggested Rorschach blots.

Jay Shriver remembered it:  Interview moved from 860 Broadway to a new building on 33rd Street in 1984. By then 860 was basically just an empty 14,000-square-foot loft, left for Andy to paint in. That’s when the paintings get really huge.… And nobody was there to bother him. That’s what enabled the Rorschachs.

Andy said, “We need a new idea.” And, by that time, it had been made very clear to me that abstraction was an important element that he wanted to pursue and abstractions weren’t being commissioned. So I thought of the Rorschachs because it was primitive printmaking.   
We had these huge canvases that we had to fold over and press together so that the paint was evenly distributed on both halves of the canvas. We took some of the huge dowels, on which canvas was shipped, and Andy, Augusto [Bugarin], Benjamin [Liu], and myself would get on our hands and knees, rolling the dowels and patting the canvas to get an even pressure across the entire surface.  (*)

Warhol remains consistent with his early works: the Rorschachs were made with no human touch, without human interference or brushwork. The other feature that refers the series to his print making period of the 1960s is that the “Rorschach” series were mass produced.

With an estimated 38 paintings total in the “Rorschach” series were not all produced only with the dark black paint. Warhol experimented with a variety of colors. Many of the famous paintings were bright red, gold and pink; he even created a beautiful mixture of the colors, mixing purple, red and violet, and in another blue, purple and pink .

Although Warhol used the same technique of pouring paint on canvas as Jackson Pollock , the two could not be more different. Jackson Pollock  believed that an act of paiting was an act of self_realization. His paintings express his inner feelings. Andy Warhol always wanted to detach himself from his work. In his words:

"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.”

Some critics say that Warhol was particularly fond of genital imagery, but others argue that the “Rorschach” paintings contained images of the devil and even death itself.

Warhol himself claimed that the inkblot paintings said nothing about him because he actually had no inner life. “I was going to hire somebody to read into them, to pretend it was me, so that they’d be a little more ... interesting,” he said. “Because all I would see would be a dog’s face or something like a tree or a bird or a flower. Somebody else could see a lot more.” (**)

Critics claim that “serious” painting for Warhol meant abstraction,… Warhol’s parody of Pollock and Color Field painting is obvious…(Joseph D. Ketner II).

I would disagree that the “Rorschach” is a parody of Pollock. We have a perfect response to his critics in his own words: “Nothing can always be the subject of something. I mean, what’s nice about those paintings is you could do them every five years ... anytime you wanted to, when you had the time ... because there’s nothing to read into them ... Because even if the paints stayed the same, everything else — and everyone else — would have changed.”

* Eli Diner, AHA

** Ariella Budick, Andy Warhol’s mature abstract works

Andy Warhol: assignment # 1

Our first assignment for assessment is to create our own work related to the subject of appropriation and repetition. When working on this piece I was thinking about pop stars and how they all feel like coming from some kind of moving assembly line.
To emphasize their template-like story I decided to produce a digital work by simply cutting and pasting faces into the same dress as if it was manufactured by a robot.
I called my work Pop Star Production.

Andy Warhol studies: blotted line technique

Andy Warhol used 'blotted line' technique during his commercial work in 1950s which became his signature style:

As I tried the technique, I quickly learned that it is not as easy as it looks. Very tricky! Too much ink and you end up with a big blot.

 Once you are done with line let it completely dry before coloring...

Andy Warhol studies: rorschach paintings

  

 My inspiration: Rorschach

From MOMA site: "This painting belongs to a series modeled on the famous "inkblot" test invented by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach. Whereas the actual test provides ten standardized blots for a patient to decipher, Warhol invented his own, achieved by painting one side of a canvas and then folding it vertically to imprint the other half. Ironically, Warhol originally misinterpreted the clinical process, believing that patients created the inkblots and doctors interpreted them: “I thought that when you went to places like hospitals, they tell you to draw and make the Rorschach Tests. I wish I’d known there was a set.” Because of this misunderstanding, Warhol’s Rorschach series is one of the few in which the artist does not rely on preexisting images."

 Working on my own Rorschach :-)

Andy Warhol course

 

Started online course 'Warhol' delivered on Coursera by University of Edinburgh. Very engaging, lots of information, friendly crowd from all over the world!

January work

Art in Lisbon

Black cobblestone 'drawings' are signature of Lisbon. 

Graffiti in the northern Lisbon

 Oh, how I loved those running bunnies with carrots! Forgot about overcrowded subway as soon as I saw them :-)

Little men

 

Re: cardboard sculpture

At the end I decided to 'decapitate' my Frosya (this is a name my mom gave to this piece) and have instead two individual parts...for now :-)

Cardboard scultpure. Part 2

Cardboard sculpture. Part 1

Clay scultpure class at Gardiner Museum of Ceramics

Untitled

Tertiary Care

The Abstraction Method of Problem Solving

Just when I feel drawn to abstraction I came across a construal level theory (CTL), an interesting study by psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman.

"People are capable of thinking about the future, the past, remote locations, another person’s perspective, and counterfactual alternatives. Without denying the uniqueness of each process, it is proposed that they constitute different forms of traversing psychological distance. Psychological distance is egocentric: Its reference point is the self in the here and now, and the different ways in which an object might be removed from that point—in time, in space, in social distance, and in hypotheticality—constitute different distance dimensions. Transcending the self in the here and now entails mental construal, and the farther removed an object is from direct experience, the higher (more abstract) the level of construal of that object. Supporting this analysis, research shows (a) that the various distances are cognitively related to each other, (b) that they similarly influence and are influenced by level of mental construal, and (c) that they similarly affect prediction, preference, and action..."


The theory has important implications for creativity. Must read!
http://psych.nyu.edu/tropelab/publications/TropeLiberman2010.pdf

Insomnia (#1)

Things Unsaid