For my own appropriation images I decided to create images based around the two main artists I was interested in, Andy Warhol and Barbra Kruger, who both appropriated images which weren’t there own and yet their adapted work became very famous amongst not only the art world but also in general society.
My first image is an appropriation of Andy Warhol’s work. When looking at his Marilyn Monroe series, I started to consider how much times have changed and how our ideas of famous women have moved with the times. Also when I began searching Andy Warhol, I learned that one of his famous quotes was “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”. From this quote I also began to consider whether the people we see nowadays as ‘celebrities’ are really worthy of the position of fame. This brought me to Kim Kardashian. In my personal opinion she is a person not worthy of the amount of fame and influence she has and will continually do various things to try and stay relevant in the media. This not only applies to her but her family in general. From this I came to the conclusion that I would create an image that mimicked Warhol’s pop art style however the image I would base this around is a paparazzi photo of Kim Kardashian. The first thing I realised was that I had to find a photo of her with blonde hair otherwise the effect would not work therefore I took to google and found one I felt would be appropriate. I then researched how one could create a similar effect to Warhol on Photoshop rather than screen printing. Once I watched a few tutorials I felt I was well informed enough to create the image. The process of adapting the image took roughly 2 hours since I had to change the various levels of the image and also created different layers which would then be coloured with pastel to match Warhol’s original aesthetic. The most time consuming part was cleaning up the overlapping colours however in the end it was all worth it since I am very happy with the end result . In the end, I believe the image came out very well and fit in well with my original intention, the only difference I would have made would have been to soften the image slightly and perhaps used lighter colours since I felt like the ones I used may have been too bright.
For my next image, I wanted to mimic the style of Barbra Kruger. When I thought of Kruger’s style I decided that I really admired the feminist side of it therefore I knew that I defiantly wished to include that aspect within my work. I then began to consider which individual I wished to base the picture around and in the end I concluded that I wanted the main person in the image to be Malala Yousafzai, a young pakistani activist who as shot at while trying to attend school and the youngest Nobel Prize winner. I chose this woman simply because she speaks out against the suppression of young people and females in less developed and has proven that no one not even terrorists can stop you from an education. For this image, I chose a high resolution picture of Malala and cropped the image down as it had to much dead space that would not be used and also this would assist in the appropriation of the image. After choosing the image I then changed the colour of the image into black and white to keep in with the themes of Kruger’s pictures. I also noticed that because of the time period of Kruger’s pictures, there was a slight blurriness and noise in the image, therefore I decided to add some noise to the picture to create a more authentic piece. The next stage of creating the image was the phrase that would be included on the image. I thought about this for a long time but then while looking through some of Kruger’s other works I noticed she would sometimes use phrases that were often said to women to discourage them, therefore I decided to use the phrase “Speak only when spoken to” as I felt it worked well with Malala speaking out against her attackers and also to terrorists in general. I added this phrase to a red rectangle and used the same font and white colour that Kruger used within her works to keep in with her chosen aesthetics. I think that although this image is simple, it is very effective at conveying a powerful message towards not only women but anyone who has struggled with similar issues to Malala.
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