Some Inspiration found in Pittsburgh

Happy New Year! Here's to a productive and prosperous 2010!

The holidays were nice, but I'm glad they are over.  I'm ready and raring to go.  Lots of plans for 2010.  

We just got back from a week in Pittsburgh with The Husband's family.   Very nice time (even with the snow and cold and freezing rain).  A highlight of the trip was finally making it to the Andy Warhol Museum.  Every year we say we are going to go, but every year we find reasons not to.  This year we went.  Andy Warhol was an interesting character, obsessed by fame and celebrities, but he was a true artist and an innovator and he took the art of screen printing to a new level.  I'm so happy we waited until this year because not only was it so appropriate now that I know so much more about the process of screen printing, but also they had an exhibit there of the work of Shepard Fairey.   For those of you not familar with the name you surely are familiar with his art work.  He created the iconic image of Obama that was everywhere during the campaign.

The exhibit featured the Obama print along with 20 years worth of other work including illustrations and screen prints. (and when I say 20 years, that's more impressive when you know he is only 39 years old!)  If you want to know more about him you can see his wikipedia page here.  What blew me away was a wall with 100 screen prints (laid out in four rows of 25).  They were all in black, white and red and they all had political undertones.  These were a few of my favorites:  

I love the way he incorporates the traditional patterns into his prints.  I also like the messages he conveys.  Another thing I noticed in the exhibit was that his prints weren't perfect. There were some prints where the ink blotched a little and other prints where the ink didn't pull through the screen all the way.  This happens to me and I get annoyed and think that I'm doing something wrong, or the piece is unsellable.  After seeing pieces up in a gallery I realized that this is the charm of the art form of screen printing, this is what makes each piece unique.  If every piece were to be perfect it would have to be done by a machine and it's no longer art.