Andy Warhol’s date of birth was August 6, 1928. His real name was Andrew Warhola. When he was a child, Andy suffered from a neurological disorder called “Sydenham chorea,’ which is associated with irregular and involuntary movements (reference the NIH’s Sydenham Chorea Information Resource). Which kept him laying in bed, his mother then gave him drawing lessons to keep him entertained during the recovery. Warhol grew a love for the hobby and continued to draw on his spare time. The disorder would most often prevent Andy from attending school, where he would cut up magazines and have fun messing with the pieces.
Growing up, his family didn’t have much money but they still managed to buy him his first camera when he was eight.
His father saw the talent in him and saved up money to pay for Andy’s college. After college Warhol moved to NYC and the rest is history. Andy Warhol was all about color. His artwork introduced a fascinating new form of artistic expression.
He used vastly different ways to express his art, like painting, photography, silkscreen printing and film. By using silkscreen printing as his form of art, he could mass-produce many prints that all looked somewhat alike. He even had other people make his prints for him. His love for mass-production took his own personality out of his work, making the painting have no specific emotion you were supposed to feel. Instead of making something with emotion in mind, he just used certain color schemes for his artwork.
Andy created a new way to look at art by mass-producing images of everyday objects. He loved to use bright colors like red, white, yellow, green, blue, and purple hues.
He mainly used tertiary colors when he was working on his famous portraits. Tertiary colors are a secondary, and a primary color mixed together evenly, he did this because they would stand out more, not only in color but in the way society viewed it. Tertiary colors weren’t commonly used by other artists. Some pieces of his work were not as colorful, for example, the Campbell Soup piece was colored almost identical to the original can. He also enjoyed creating portraits of famous celebrities, but still, Warhol didn’t put any emotion into his choice of color. His screen silk prints were are often made up of a monochromatic color scheme, which means “having tints or shades of just one color; a complementary color scheme, which means the colors used are on opposite sides of the color wheel.” (reference Erin Nolan’s Types of Color Schemes in Design resource).
His decision to use colors based solely on the color scheme and not because of any sensation for the color adds to Andy’s detached method of making several of the same prints but with different colors. One of the best examples of the way Warhol used color would be one of his prints named “Skull”. This piece has a monochromatic color scheme. He used neutral tones, but it’s actaully monochromatic because the colors are tints of one color; black. This isn’t the only print of this picture, he made many that are identical but he used different colors. This shows how he unattached color with sensation.
What Andy Warhol’s Childhood Was Like. (2022, Feb 27). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/what-andy-warhol-s-childhood-was-like/