Screen Printing

Wake Up and Rage!

This piece is a screen print titled “Wake up and Rage!”.  This was my very experience with screen printing. Before starting the sketches for my screen print I looked at a lot of screen prints by Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol was an american artist who lived from 1928-1987, he is well known as an influential artist in the pop art movement. Pop art is a movement that challenged the rules of the fine art world by including images from pop culture, such as celebrities, advertisements, news media, etc. Warhol began his career as an artist doing commercial illustrations. It was after his career as an illustrator that Warhol began creating the iconic art that he is known for today. I was inspired by his photo silkscreens depicting celebrities with bold, gaudy colors. 

For example the image to the right is a screen print of the rock star Mick Jagger from the band The Rolling Stones and was produced in 1975. The print has photo elements, as well as hand drawn marks, and rectilinear planes of color. The print evokes the sensual bad boy persona of Mick Jagger.  The photo on the left shows four different screen prints of the Marilyn Monroe.

 I was attracted to the hideous combinations of colors he put over the faces of beautiful celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, and Mick Jagger. The colors seem to be a metaphor for their ridiculous, over the top personas and behavior. I wanted the colors and the, pose in my piece to evoke an exaggerated version of myself. I see this as a metaphor for people born in my generation, which has been given the nickname the millennials. We are often stereotyped as lazy, narcissistic, and entitled by older generations of Americans. These stereotypes are generalized, overstated, and untrue. Just like the persona in this portrait is an exaggerated, cartoon version of myself.

In my sunglasses the world Rage is written across the lenses. I was drawn to this word because in my vocabulary, and the vocabulary of my peers the word rage generally has two distinct definitions. The more traditional definition of this term came from the english dictionary: anger, fury, violent anger, a fit of violent anger. The second definition which is more commonly used among my friends and peers, comes from urbandictionary.com: “to party extremely hard”. I like the idea that depending on who is viewing this piece they will can interpret the word in a different way.