«Andy Warhol’s Dreams»

In July 1962 Andy Warhol showed 32 canvases of Campbell's soup cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, one for each flavour the company sold. Paintings of supermarket products hung in a row like goods on a shelf, and that was both the joke and the point. The idea that fame and branding can be painted like groceries is where this piece of warhol style art begins.

A young woman with a dark bob, one yellow streak and green eyes faces you from a deep black background. Her arms and stomach are covered in tattoo-like panels of pop art quotes: a yellow portrait, a Campbell's Black Bean Soup can, Coca-Cola logos on her chest and green bottles near her hip, rows of dollar signs, a comic-book girl with a blue eye, a zebra, a banana, and a revolver across her stomach.

Her face and arms are sliced into shifted strips, with black bars and pixel-sized blocks, as if the picture were buffering. The black ground is thick with raised marks, and a few colour blocks float on the left.

The soup can, the bottles, the dollar signs and the banana are all Warhol territory. He made Green Coca-Cola Bottles in 1962, the Dollar Sign paintings in 1981, the banana for the cover of The Velvet Underground & Nico in 1967, and the Guns series around 1981 and 1982. The comic girl nods to Roy Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl of 1963, and the blocks on the left to Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow of 1930.

Warhol style art is usually about repeating images, so I put all of it on a body as tattoos because that is where images live now: on skin, on logos, on screens. On a dark wall this original pop art painting would anchor a room, and it works well as pop art for living room walls.

Most of my original paintings are already in private collections, but I paint originals to order in any size. To ask about this one, message me on Instagram or by email. There is also a hand-finished lithograph of this work.