Week 1 – Artist Research and Iterations

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was an American artist and was known as a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. In the early stages of his career (around late 1940s to early 1950s) he was more dedicated to commercial and advertising art, even drawing shoes for the Glamour magazine. In the 1960s he used the silk screen printing technique for his paintings, this made it easier for him to produce art that had repetition elements. In one of his most iconic pieces ‘Marilyn Diptych‘ it consists of Marilyn Monroe’s face repeated 50 times but shown in different colours. They are essentially the same thing but with slight differences, expressing the idea of repeatedly copying something to the point it becomes original.

Ed Ruscha

Edward Ruscha is an American artist who is also associated with the pop art movement. He has experience in painting, printmaking, drawing, photography and film. ‘Twenty-six Gasoline Stations‘ is his first artist book and features exactly as the title says, twenty six photographs of gasoline stations next to captions indicating their brand and location. I think the book embodies Ruscha’s journey from Los Angeles to Oklahoma, as Ruscha would drive to visit his parents in Oklahoma four or five times a year. He got inspired by books he saw for sale in his trip to Europe in 1961 and was impressed by the “non-commercial look” they had. Back in Los Angeles he thought of the title, then the typography and then the photography. He took around 60 photos of gasoline stations in his journey to Oklahoma but then trimmed it down to 26 photos as he felt the rest were too interesting. The book in my eyes expresses iterative making as it shows 26 photos of essentially the same thing, they are all gasoline stations but are taken at different angles and distances to make every photograph unique, even though they feature nearly identical buildings.

Iteration Work

To make a body of work that consists of repetition and variation I thought of stages of an object, for example a gun that is on the process of firing a bullet. I started off by drawing a pistol by itself, its natural state. I then drew the same thing but instead the trigger has been pulled. The third drawing the bullet shell has ejected from the gun and you can see some smoke coming out, the fourth drawing has gone back to stage one but now you can see some of the smoke remaining in stage three.