The Pop Art Portrait
March 31st, 2010
Pop Art paintings these days mostly come in the form of the pop art portrait. Thanks to Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe classic piece, artists have since drawn on his revolutionary style to create awesome paintings of other musicians, film stars and politcal icons. The same or similar effects - using bright industrial colours, cartoon or collage-like images, duplication and simplistic brushstrokes or prints – are regularly applied by modern day pop art artists.
Pop art paintings are about painting the real world but in a contemporary style. The pop art portrait of a famous star will often take their most known or iconic photograph and transfer it into a fun, colourful, logo-like image. Paintings in this style of Jimi Hendrix for instance have usually been taken from one of his most popular Album covers, as this best represents Jimi as a commodity of popular culture rather than Jimi as a person.
Icons like Hendrix, the Beatles, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, James Dean and many more, have transformed into symbols. Symbols of which their few iconic images have become more important and known to the masses than what they actually did in their lives or what they were really like as a person. The person becomes insignificant, what they represent or symbolize becomes all-powerful.
Pop art paintings of such icons will either directly attack this iconic symbolization or celebrate it. Warhol created ‘A shot of Marilyn Monroe’ in a way that criticized consumerism and popular culture, by mundanely repeating and fading Marilyn’s face as though she was merely a product passing by on a factory conveyor belt. Other artists however, especially today, re-create album covers or iconic photos with bold, bright, pop-art style effects to emphasize the symbolic nature of the stars. These are the kind of pop art paintings that people everywhere want to hang in their homes, cafe’s or offices – to give them inspiration, to allow them to be closer to those they admire and to remind them of special times or movies or music that they love.
This kind of pop art portrait is the most popular today. Perhaps not for acclaimed art critics, but for the average guy or girl. Thus the term ‘pop‘ art.
Here are some cool links I came across to other art blogs:
- keep off media(n): what’s (in) a sign? – already more days have passed than i wanted since my first post on signs — i haven’t been carrying my camera around with me as i’ve been running around doing holiday shopping, bike has been in the shop, and with all the interesting …
- museums in a minute – warhol became the central figure in the pop art movement that emerged in the united states in the 1950s and was to become one of the major art movements of the 20th century with its themes and techniques drawn from popular culture. …
- Office’s January eNews now available online – Check out the January issue of the Office of Arts Funding open for youth arts projects; Artist sought for new First Hill Streetcar artwork; Seeking artists to …
- www.123soho.com
The Pop Art Paintings of Warhol
December 21st, 2009
Andy Warhol, born in Pittsburg, Penslvania, was by far the most famous of all the pop art artists, and arguably the most influential. After having a successful career as an illustrator for comericial companies, he went on to recieve worldwide acclaim for his work as a photographer, painter, author, record producer, filmaker and public figure. He was a pioneer of the pop art movement, but it was not only his pop art paintings that brought him fame.
Warhol was openly gay, which was very controversial at the time. He was also notorious for hanging out in wildly differing social circles that included wealthy aristocrats, hollywood celebrities, intellectuals and bohemiam street folk.
Andy Warhol’s pop art paintings were characterised by putting unconventional and un-arty materials to his creations such as comics, prints, writing etc. He successfully blurred the borders between industrial products and art. He used to paint in bright colours and documented the products consumed by Americans.
Some of Warhol’s best pop art paintings include Red Car Crash, Purple Jumping Man, Orange Disaster, cans of Campbell’s Soup, A Shot Of Marilyn Monroe and the BMW Art Car Project.
Warhol was also known for breaking traditional art boundaries by duplicating his creations many times. One of his most famous pop art paintings to this day, which incorporated this technique, was ‘A Shot of Marilyn Monroe’. ‘A Shot of Marilyn Monroe’ represented the star and social icon of that time, Marilyn Monroe, duplicated several times and in industrial colours. In this world-known pop art portrait he turned the superstar and idolised actress into an accessible duplicated image that the public could hang up in their homes. By doing this he furthered the blurred line between Marilyn Monroe as a person and as a product. 
The ‘Green Coco-Cola Bottles’ artwork was created in 1962 by Warhol. The bottles are painted in perfect precision and requires the viewer to focus on each bottle individually as they’re not unified. The precision an d the clean and cold-cut effect are characteristic of pop art paintings. The ‘Coca-cola Bottles’ are part empty. This creates the irony that machines are capable of making errors, not just humans.
Warhol used these everyday banal objects as the subject of his pop art paintings to ironically criticise the capitalistic ways of the consumerist society that had developed. In doing so, he began to diminish the gap between reality and art.
Over the years Warhol got christened with the title the ‘Pope of Pop’, and rightfully so…We love you Andy Warhol!
Pop Art Paintings
November 25th, 2009Hi there world-wide-web! 
My name is Konrad Ray Sanders, you may call me Kon. I’m a Pop Art Artist, originally from & mostly based in London, but have been known to scour the earth on artistic quests from time to time. I want to introduce you all to Pop Art Paintings.
So first of all, here’s a bit of background and history for you…
When we say ’Pop Art’ we refer to a term coined by John McHale in the 1950s which represented a pre-postmodern artistic movement that sprang to life at that time. This movement arose mainly in (my home city) London and also in New-York. The inspiration for pop art paintings was rooted in western capitalistic modern society and so the subject of these works embodied the crazy ’produce, buy & sell’ culture that was hastily developing at the time.
Pop art surfaced in many different forms, including fashion, music, theater, plastic art and of course (my favourite) pop art paintings.
Some of the absolute classic examples, that you’ll know even if you’re artistically clueless, include ‘A Shot of Marilyn Munroe’ by Andy Warhol, ‘Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Home So Appealing‘ by Richard Hamilton and ‘Whaam‘ by Roy Lichtenstein. Do they ring any bells? (Check out the pics)
Pop art paintings are usually characterized by a choice of subject borrowed from modern-day consumerist culture and are often painted in bright, bold, industrial colors. Pop art artists have been seen to extract the every-day object from its every-day context and fashion it magnificently into a symbolic icon. This is done by blowing up the images, coloring them with bright luminous paints and mechanically duplicating them next to one another like manufactured products in a factory or on super-market shelf.
By having such commonly-used, bland, conventional products at the fore-front of these paintings, the difference between art and reality is shrinking further and further until somewhere down the line it will be entirely lost.
Pop art paintings ironically criticise the manufactured world we live in today. Whats even more ironic is that images of the most famous popart artworks, such as the Marilyn Monroe, have become so popular, that they too have now been repeatedly reproduced on a mass-scale and consumed by the world’s hungry population.
But what can we do? We love pop art paintings!
If this all seems like artsy-jargon to ya, don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of pics coming up, so you can see it all for yourselves…