OUGD406 - Brief 04 - Inspiration for Aesthetic

Warhol's Space Fruit series: Throughout his career, Andy Warhol worked with assistants and printers to create numerous print portfolios. In 1977 he met printer Rupert Jasen Smith who worked with him to create the series Space Fruit. These prints demonstrate Warhol’s experimentation with a centuries-old genre in painting—the still life. Still lifes by their very nature are choreographed compositions focusing on shape, color, space and oftentimes symbolism. Warhol was interested in the use of shadows as a compositional element. He first placed one or more pieces of fruit on a white back ground, lit it from an angled position so that shadows were cast onto the white paper, and then photographed these compositions. He also used collage and drawing to create the source imagery for the additional screens used in each print. Each color in these images represents a different silkscreened layer of the print. The printing process allowed Warhol endless colour combinations within each composition.

A portfolio of screen prints by Warhol, bizarrely titled ‘Space Fruits’, was published in 1979. Although based on the traditional subject of still-lifes of fruit, Warhol’s fruits are treated in a distinctly non-representational manner. This image of a watermelon appears more like a meteor than something edible. This highlights his evolving interest in abstract art which developed in his work in the late seventies. He has incorporated blocks of irregularly shaped colour, which, although screen-printed, appear like collaged fragments of coloured paper. He has also combined photographic aspects with printed hand-drawn lines that, while emphasising details, add to the abstracted quality.

My response: The reason I chose to use Andy Warhol as inspiration, is because I wanted my booklet not only to give helpful tips and advice to fresher, but to promote the value of analogue printing techniques. In an ideal world, I would have screen printed these posters (mainly time restrictions and organising my time with other briefs meant that I wasn't able to use this technique) Screen printing has been one of my favourite techniques to use for a very long time and I wanted to show this through my design treatment. I believe that the freshers should be completely aware of techniques such as screen printing, so who else better to grab inspiration from than Andy Warhol. His work is visually arresting and timeless, and I wanted to try and reflect this through my designs. Hopefully I have subtly communicated this passion for analogue design through my zine and set of posters.