The Underground Velvet

I chose a potato because the Warhol work that I was most familiar with was his cover for the famous Underground Velvet album – the banana photo. This photo represents one of Warhol's most famous themes, making simple things interesting. A banana is one of the most ordinary substances out there, and yet it is now one of his most iconic productions. Moreover, it truly represents commercial imagery and pop art. That was the reasoning behind me looking to portray another kind of fruit or vegetable. However, another reason why the banana was such an interesting image was because while most fruits and vegetables taste best when clean and fresh, the banana is in fact sweeter and riper when parts of its skin have turned darkish-brown in color. Potatoes are similar in this aspect in that they usually have many bumps and dark spots due to them being roots but that is simply their natural look. They too are not exactly clean looking, like brown bananas. Potatoes are also a popular food here so this brings into focus the idea of commercial imagery, which Warhol had his roots in.

Warhol also had many series of paintings of nearly identical images, usually taken in various color gradients. I tried to recreate that aesthetic by recomposing my original photo with various color gradients, and then making a collage of them online. In fact, this is one of his most famous techniques and his famous series of prints of Marilyn Monroe in this fashion have come to define pop art, with the glamorous colors. To me, this photo is what a lot of pop art is. It has the same cool ambivalence emotion that so many paintings in this genre possess. It takes a simple item and tries to make it interesting in some manner. I tried to show the realism of the item as well, captured in a more captivating manner via the uses of colors and points.