Pop Art Paintings

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

Technorati Tags: andy warhol, icon art, Pop Art Portrait, pop art portraits