Artists Books Research 5

Celebrity Portrait Paintings
HOWIE GREEN

Howie's portraits join traditional painting and digital technology to imitate the style developed by Warhol, in his own unique way. "I was looking for a way to do something with my art and with my growing pile of computers and technology and I found it." Howie mentions his use of colour and said, "I was in art school during the era, of Peter Max, Yellow Submarine and the San Francisco rock posters. What can I say? I guess it "coloured" my thinking!”

Howie stated on his own website “Andy Warhol made the whole idea of "fame" more famous and he turned the idea of a celebrity portrait into an art form. Treating already familiar images of celebrities in artistic and interesting ways, Warhol, Steve Kaufman, Peter Max and numerous artists showed new ways to present our favourite celebrities as "Art". I use acrylic and various other media with my painterly technique to create portraits that are hopefully as colourful and entertaining as the celebrities themselves.”

Howie’s Madonna piece uses acrylic and mixed media to add texture and life. When it comes to creating my final images, I intend to use enthusiastic colours which are cleverly used to show high and lowlights of the face. Despite Howie’s piece showing loose brush strokes and texture of the acrylic, I can see myself struggling to put into practice this approach as I am use to presenting precision and detail.

The painting of Biggie Smalls shows much more darker and shadowy colours which are used mainly to show his urban/hip hop genre along with Biggie’s race and background. Lighter colours make the image look as an artificial light could be lighting up Biggie Smalls which also emphasis the idea of dark colours used for dark shadows. I'd like to incorporate this technique of lighting to show where the light is hitting on my faces and where it’s not so visible. Howie’s painting show much bolder brush strokes of thick acrylic compared to his painting of Madonna. It appears to me as though Howie has avoided contact with water when using acrylics. When painting my image, I mixed a lot of my colours with water, mainly for the first layer of paint. This painting hasn't inspired me as much as the portrait of Madonna because after looking at it I felt it lacked time to make it appear professional. However there are plenty of lively colours present in Howie’s painting which showed me I could use more colours than just the primary and secondary colours.