On July 23, 2015 I had the opportunity to view the exhibit In Living Color: Andy Warhol and Contemporary Printmaking at the Tampa Museum of Art. As a preface to this entry (actually my second draft since the first disappeared into the internet), I wish to make a few things known.
- I have never studied art formally or academically. I am a frequent viewer of art where I encounter it and frequent museum visitor, but have never undertaken a scholarly study of art. My artist friend Bob Lyon, once said to me in response to my statement that in art I know what I like, "and you like what you know."
- I have always been a fan of Andy Warhol's art, though not a fan of his films.
- For the past two years I have attempted to create my own examples of art (images) in order to have something enjoyable to look at on the wall. Many examples of my images are collected in the gallery of this website. Some physical examples are in the hands of a few friends and relatives, but most hang on the walls of our apartments in Pennsylvania and Texas.
A couple of statements printed in a section of the exhibit catalog resonated with me. In the section by Karin Campbell (Joslyn Art Museum) the statement "I like boring things." attributed to Andy Warhol is repeated. Assuming the word "boring" is used as an adjective and not as a gerund, then my images contain a bit of the boring as well. Many of my images contain repeated elements which may bore some viewers, but I find comfort and enjoyment in repetition. For me this even extends to the music created by Philip Glass (one of my favorite composers), whose repeated patterns in music may bore (or even actively irritate) some listeners, but which I find pleasing. Who doesn't have a favorite film that they can watch over and over? The second statement is the assertion that the Pop Artists "endeavored to eradicate the notion of the 'genius artist' and to downplay the role of originality in art, adopting mechanical means of generating images". Without being in the inner circle of Pop Artists I find myself operating in the same way, often not my choice, but by circumstance. I write computer codes that when executed, generate images. This is a mechanical process. Almost all of my created images are inspired by (or copied from) other examples of art I encounter. Since it is the computer code and the computer which manifest the art, it is easy to generate similar images employing different color palettes, or to use randomness to generate families of similar images. In this way I don't hear the descriptors "boring" and "mechanical" as negatives when thinking about the images I create.
I also enjoyed the art of other artists included in the In Living Color exhibit.
Here is my homage to Josef Albers' Homage to the Square.
A sculpture in front of the Fifth Third Bank in Tampa and my take on it.