7 Lessons From Andy Warhol

Tate Modern’s forthcoming retrospective of the Pop Artist’s work is the perfect chance to learn from his unique approach to painting says Ravneet Ahluwalia

- Ravneet Ahluwalia

1 DRAWING UNDERPINS EVERYTHING

Andy Warhol is best known for his bold silkscreen prints, yet all the qualities that defined his most famous artworks were evident right from the very beginning. The reductive lines, the bold shapes, the voyeuristic fascination with people – these facets can all be seen in his 1950s drawings, such as Boy with Flowers [part of Tate Modern’s new retrospective], where the influence of artists such as Jean Cocteau and Henri Matisse are most apparent.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1928, Warhol initially worked as a commercial illustrator, producing everything from shoe advertisements to record sleeves. Skilled draughtsmanship underpinned everything that he did.

If drawing is not your strong point, don’t worry though. Warhol often traced around projections of photographs during his early years to get the desired effects. In fact, without relying on these rudimentary methods, he may never have alighted on his most famous process. After all, his fondness for both using tracing paper to repeat images and blotting ink lines while still wet to create variations in the line are precursors of his silkscreen methods.

2 EMBRACE REPETITION

Andy Warhol’s first solo exhibition of Pop Art took place in New York in 1962. It was here that he debuted his first silkscreen-printed canvases featuring repeated images of subjects including dollar bills and soup cans. “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine,” he famously told Art News, a reference to his newly-discovered process.

While repeating the same motif may seem like a lazy way to fill a canvas, I like to think of Warhol’s approach in terms of Claude Monet’s series paintings, which depicted the same subject from the same angle under differing conditions.