Hello, ladies!
This is now the 5th letter I’ve written you, but I have not heard back! Are you there? Am I boring you with the most well known art in the world? Tough noogies! Art is important!
This week I started taking a new class (I try to learn at least one new thing every year – last year I took a long series of classes on wedding planning, which was a lot of fun, but this year I’m taking something a little shorter and with less homework!). The class I just started is on an artist named Andy Warhol.
Andy Warhol is considered the founding father of the “pop art” movement. The pop stands for “popular”, because a lot of his work focused around celebrities and things that were popular in American culture at the time. He did a lot of different things, but he’s probably most famous for his portraits of Marilyn Monroe – which he did over and over and over again in lots of different colors, and his painting of a Campbells soup can.
One of Andy’s main points was that the amazing thing about things that become popular – like Campbells soup and Coca-Cola- are that everyone can have them, from celebrities to regular people. It doesn’t matter if you’re the president of the United States or a girl living in Windermere, Florida – when you get a can of Coke, you get EXACTLY the same thing that the president gets when he gets a can of Coke. If you go to the store in Florida and get chicken and stars soup (that’s my favourite Campbells), and I go to the store in New Jersey and get chicken and stars soup, and Justin Beiber (or whoever the coolest singer in the world is – I am not down with what you young people are into these days because NOBODY WRITES ME LETTERS AND TELLS ME WHAT’S COOL WITH THE YOUNG CROWD) goes to the store in California to get chicken and stars soup, we all get the same exact soup – he can be the richest, most famous, most amazing singer in the world, and he can’t get a better can of Campbell’s soup than you or I can get. And that’s kind of cool.
However, cans of soup don’t make particularly interesting paintings, if you ask me. And I kind of think a lot of his paintings of people make them look pretty ugly –he liked to color makeup in really bright and it looks a little odd, and most of the time he duplicated the images over and over again, so that you think less about the person and more about their celebrity-ness as a thing, just like a can of soup or a banana.
I think my favourite Andy Warhol piece is his painting of a zebra. It reminds me a lot of the zebras on Eva’s green blanket, because it has wonderful bright colors that don’t normally show up on zebras in the regular world…and that is awesome.
This week my homework for class is to create an Andy Warhol-ish piece of art for my own, by taking an image of something popular and then re-coloring it and repeating it over and over. I am finding it VERY hard to choose a subject, but I will try to remember to send you a picture of the finished piece so you can see what I did.
So that’s all I have to say about Andy Warhol for now! Know that I love you both very much and think that you are awesome.
Hugs and kisses,
Auntie Paula
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