Diamond Dust Shoes notes

Diamond Dust Shoes
Acrylic, silk screen ink and diamond dust on linen.

• Photograph: This is a film negative taken in black and white

• The blacks are separated from the whites by contrast

• The photo was most likely enlarged drastically for this large canvas

• Warhol simplified the image to a very simple, contrastive gradation

• Under layer of off-white

• Black background color

• First took the white shades from the photograph and, using only the basic form of each shoe, chose 14 colors:

o Dark brown
o Orange
o Tan
o Sea foam green
o Burnt umber
o Mustard yellow
o Bubble gum pink
o Dark robins egg blue
o Lavender
o Lighter shade of the first dark brown
o Slate gray
o Sage green
o Bold blue
o Pastel green

• Each of the shoes appears to have been screened separately creating texture and separating each shoe.

• Also makes the process more complex and time consuming. Actually harder than the mass production that he normally portrays.

• The process of using separate screens for each shoe is apparent especially where some of the shoes over lap

• The green, blue, and lavender shoes in the bottom left corner demonstrates this:

• The heel of the blue shoe overlaps the lavender shoe showing the layers of paint.

• If the shoes were not separately screened, they could have been filled in by hand after the initial screen, but this wouldn’t follow Warhol’s normal process.

• On the lower left hand corner, the green shoe has a strip where the green paint didn’t come through. Underneath the green, there is an off white, cream color.

• Rough form not really focused on detail at all but there are shaded areas, which become filled in with the background color based on the shading of the photograph.

• The next screen fills in the details of the shading on the shoes

• The final layer, and I don’t really understand how this works, is the diamond dust layer.

• Because this layer is not opaque paint like the other layers, but a “dusting” of glitter, which, apparently, is made of diamonds, this works well in the gradation of the photo, slowly fading out like a shadow really does.

• Some of these shadows are screened on in a thick and dark layer of the diamond dust. This is why the diamond dust appears to be the last layer.

• The label inside the shoe proves that the process Warhol used was not an inverted negative because the words would be backwards.

• Imperfections in the color > drips, areas that weren’t filled in, ect. Alert the viewer to the industrial / mass produced aspect.

• This piece is better viewed from far away because the intent is to view it as a whole and Warhol was not specifically detailed oriented.

As I was doing this assignment, an older british man and his wife walked up. The man proclaimed that he had cracked the mystery of the diamond dust. Meanwhile, I’m sitting on the floor, staring intently at this piece trying to figure out how Warhol got the diamond dust precisely where he wanted it and not where he did not. He proclaimed that it was “model railroad glitter” that Warhol attached with spray adhesive. While I do not really think this completely accurate, it made me think:

• Rather than using a screen to get the diamond dust precisely where he wanted it, I think that he used the screen to get the glue (or whatever adhesive he used) where he wanted it just like he would have if it were paint.

• When this was done, he probably covered the canvas in diamond dust. At this point, the dust would stay where he wanted it.

• o In order for this to work, the other layers of paint would have to be completely dry.

• o The darkness of the diamond dust depends upon the density with which it is applied to the canvas.

• Probably sanded away or otherwise removed the diamond dust where they did not originally want it.

All of this work done by a group of people working for Warhol. Therefore, this process – a very time and labor intensive process – was not actually done by him.

The Warhol Museum

Marlon 1986
Silk Screen on Linen

Unlike his other pieces, this silk screen is a black and white photo printed onto a piece of linen. Without the stylistic bright colors and unrealistic representation of a celebrity, this piece is striking for its realistic quality. Granted, it is a glamour shot of this Marlon character, wearing a tilted hat and sitting on his motorcycle. The neutral shade of the linen on which the black and white image is printed becomes the color pallet of the piece. It has an old fashioned feel due to the grainy resolution that results from screen printing in general and more specifically screen printing onto an uneven surface.

Being an artist myself, with a focus on graphic design and geometric abstraction, the off-centeredness of this print chipped at my OCD tendencies to have perfectly straight and centered lines. With a large canvas and a large image, one might expect the artist to center the image so that it becomes the focal point of the canvas. However, for stylistic reasons, Warhol places it off-center to the right hand quadrant. Although I have no explanation for this decision, it illustrates Warhol’s interest in process. It also brings up the idea of how a viewer reacts to a piece. This piece caught my eye due to the way in which it aggravated me. Art does not always have to be visually pleasing. Rather, it has to convey some message, emotion, or display some concept that is unexpected.

The Warhol Museum

Reflected (Zeitgeist Series) 1982
Acrylic Silk Screen

Entering into one of the bigger spaces in the gallery, you cannot help being drawn to this piece. Printed on a tall and very long canvas, the size alone is impeccable. Then you realize that the actual silkscreen being repeated is tiny in comparison to the canvas it is printed on.

Horizontal stripes of the most primary shades of red, green, and blue serve as the background over which the black silk screen is printed. Having no prior understanding of what “zeitgeist” means, (using the trusty Oxford English Dictionary, Zeitgeist is defined as: The spirit or genius which marks the thought or feeling of a period or age) I assumed it was some piece of machinery, such as a lie detector, which records data through a series of repeated lines. However, upon returning and discovering the true definition, I am left wondering what the image, with its vertical lines and single horizontal line at the bottom, really is. It must be of some significance to society, culture, or one of Warhol’s common themes because it was repeated so many times and then given a name alluding to its “genius” and significance to the atmosphere of the time.

Returning to the composition of the piece, the seamless repetition of the process of silk screening the same image over and over, in a bold and completely opaque shade of black, deserves attention. Fitting together like a puzzle, the math and understanding of space demonstrates the skill with which Warhol has mastered his craft. Not a single print is partial and, without an understanding of his process, one might assume that, rather than a small screen repeated over and over, it is a large screen repeated in three rows corresponding to the underlying colors. Although the overbearing shade in view is the bold black of the print, the primary colors mentioned above poke through giving the image a different look as the stripes of color change. Even after a deeper investigation has revealed to me that I do not understand this piece as I originally thought I had, it does not diminish the lasting memory this piece has had on me out of the entire museum.

The Warhol Museum

Steve Wynn 1983
Silkscreen on linen

Belonging to Warhol’s collection of celebrity silk screens, this two canvas piece captured my attention with its air of glitz and glamour. Painted in my personal favorite combination of black and gold, this piece utilizes a technique that is unique to the process of silk screening from a photograph: inversion. By flipping the negative of a roll of film, the highlights, meant to be in lighter shades, become the darker shades and vise-versa. The left hand canvas had a gold background and the subject was printed in black, the right hand and inverted image had a black background and the subject was printed in gold. This technique goes a step beyond Warhol’s usual pop-art style.

As like any student of art, I have been desensitized to Warhol’s pop-art portraits, having seen and studied so many of them. However, upon walking into a room full of them, this one was different. Not knowing the subject of this piece, Steve Wynn, with his striking features, I was distracted by this subtle change in style. Rather than presenting a celebrity face, this piece introduced me to a new side of Warhol that was, not only inspiring, but refreshing in a sea of pop-art style portraits.

The Warhol Museum

Police Car 1983
Acrylic Silk Screen on Linen

Awkwardly hung somewhere between bellybutton and knee level, this piece caught my eye with its bright, but not particularly complementary, colors and the obvious statement it makes upon first glance. This is a police car.

The gradation of lines, transitioning from thin to thick, in a royal blue against a Barney The Dinosaur purple, screamed 80’s to my 90’s child mind. The angular line drawing of the car and the stylized font used to convey the unsubtle message across the top jumped out to me in graphic “pop.” Simple, yet eye catching, I could picture this image being reproduced multiple times in an array of color combinations while still being able to hold onto the original visual impact. Once again, Warhol has isolated a single aspect of the current culture, removed it from its usual habitat, and made it into a piece of art accessible to anyone, from a 6 year old child to an 80 year old man, who has lived in this country.

The Warhol Museum

Trash 1976-1986
Gelatin Silver Print, sewn with thread

Walking through a room of Warhol’s gelatin silver prints, a common theme of repetition and subject matter that make carefully planned out patterns, the most striking was Trash. In this piece, the camera captured a section of what appears to be a trash dump. However, upon further investigation, the individual pieces of trash – food wrappers, a Tropicana orange juice carton, newspapers, a paisley printed rag, tin foil, and a shoe magazine – collectively become a glimpse into, not only the time, but the culture from which the photo was taken.

True to Warhol’s style, this single image is repeated four times and sewn together in a relatively sloppy style to show process and to emphasize an industrial and consumerist society. Although relatively busy, the focal point of each of the four prints is a bright white shoe magazine. Having entered into this museum with a thorough understanding, not only of Warhol as a person, but of his style and interest in consumerism and production, this piece seemed to epitomize Warhol as an artist. Taking a pile of trash, repeating it four times, sewing it together to make it a single piece, and then presenting it to the viewer: although not silk screened or drawn, this is Warhol. The repetition of this cluttered image could not help but be imprinted in my head.

From Work To Text: Summary

Roland Barthes’ From Work To Text explores the role and contrasts of “work” and “text” in a changing literary culture. Important to this comparison between previous conceptions of work and text and current conceptions are the schools of thought from which they are emerging: Marxism, Freudianism, and Structuralism. Claiming that these new sociological and psychological conditions, in combination with older disciplines of thought, produce the current interdisciplinary perception of literature. Barthes’ goal in this essay is to illustrate two conceptually different terms that are commonly misunderstood through an explanation of the changes in critical thinking.