Pop Art

"Everything is beautiful. Pop is everything."- Andy Warhol


I'll give you eight guesses as to what we had for lunch. Yes, you got it! Tomato soup and toasted cheese sandwiches. A perfect lunch for a winter's day.

Where did the soup cans come from? The grocery store where I most frequently shop ran a special last week: Campbell's tomato or chicken noodle soup for 50 cents per can, but you had to buy 10 cans total (the other 2 that I picked were chicken noodle) to get the deal. Voila! And suddenly, I had an art project!

So before there was lunch, there was a tiny break for art. I liked the soup cans and I liked the way they looked. They were red and cheery, with that traditional gold medallion on the label. Better yet, there were lots of them.

I saw in them an opportunity to pay homage to Andy Warhol, an American artist (a native Pennsylvanian, as he was born in Pittsburgh and is also buried there) who became famous in the 1960s for his paintings of pop art topics: soup cans and celebrities, among other things.

I do not know that I hold much in common with Mr. Warhol other than an appreciation for art (and beauty) found in repetition, in everyday things. I like that his work asked the important question of What is art? It is a topic well worth continuing to discuss.

The soundtrack to this image . . . In the late 1980s, I discovered a UK-based alternative pop/punk rock band called Transvision Vamp, fronted by Wendy James. The first song of theirs I may have heard was probably either I Want Your Love or Revolution Baby, but Tell That Girl to Shut Up became a favorite (a personal guilty pleasure). They only released three albums, and I pulled the song to accompany this image from their debut album, Pop Art. So here is Transvision Vamp, with Andy Warhol's Dead.