Pop Art – Tuesday Elementary Art Class

Sorry for the delay in getting these images posted.  It has been a busy couple of weeks at The Studio as we wrap up the remodel and get ready to move.

I miss all of you so much and can’t wait to get back to class.

For one of the last projects in the Tuesday Elementary Art Class we took a look at Pop Art.

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We started the class by talking about Pop Art and Andy Warhol’s famous prints. Pop artists celebrated commonplace objects and people of everyday life, in this way seeking to elevate popular culture to the level of fine art.

Andy Warhol used common everyday objects for his art such as soup cans, cars, butterflies and panda bears. We looked at and talked about his famous Campbell’s Soup Cans paintings.

Warhol’s iconic series of Campbell’s Soup Cans paintings were never meant to be celebrated for their form or compositional style, like that of the abstractionists. What made these works significant was Warhol’s co-opting of universally recognizable imagery, such as a Campbell’s soup can, Mickey Mouse, or the face of Marilyn Monroe, and depicting it as a mass-produced item, but within a fine art context. In that sense, Warhol wasn’t just emphasizing popular imagery, but rather providing commentary on how people have come to perceive these things in modern times: as commodities to be bought and sold, identifiable as such with one glance. This early series was hand-painted, but Warhol switched to screenprinting shortly afterwards, favoring the mechanical technique for his mass culture imagery. 100 canvases of campbell’s soup cans made up his first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and put Warhol on the art world map almost immediately, forever changing the face and content of modern art.

For our project we made Andy Warhol inspired block prints.

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We choose a simple image to print such as an ice cream cone, cupcake or a coke bottle.   We learned about block printing and how the carved lines will not show on the print. We then printed the object four times and mounted it on paper.

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Can’t wait to see you-all again!

Jamie

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