Canned Feelings
By Mani Nabavi
My artwork expresses what all art means to me. The can is a testament to the paintings of Andy Warhol, who repainted Campbell’s Soup©️ cans trying to find what meaningless felt like. Andy Warhol spent his whole career repainting his pieces, trying to experience emptiness. This desire was powerful, as he was once said: “The more you look at the exact same thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.” He painted like a machine, making exact replicas of the same painting. That desire and persistence are what made me fall in love with his artwork.
But to me, art is an empty shell of how artists feel when they create their art. Unlike Andy Warhol, I believe that art is a way to carry your emotions across hundreds of years. What the artist felt at the exact moment they were making their creation, whether good or bad, is what has been embedded in their artwork for all of its existence. Most often, this is unintentional or maybe even unwanted, but it is always a mandatory part of the artwork. I like to conceive art as a museum piece, how it shows a glimpse of the past and what was going on the day the piece was made. My art isn’t meant to make a point or prove something, it only exists to convey my emotions.
For my inhale, I researched 3 different modern artists and wrote about their art style and their method. The artists I researched were Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and Andy Warhol, who all had a place in the MoMA(Museum of Modern Art.), my main place of research. all three had very different views of art. Picasso used art to see how shapes, colors, and edges clashed against each other on the canvas. kandinsky beleived in very abstract art, he warped shapes until they were indistinguisable. And Andy Warhol tried repitition in his artwork, repainting the same piece very many times until he felt like the meaning was lost and all that was left inside the viewer was joy and emptiness. despite these three’s very different outlooks on art, their art is still treasured and used as insiration for many aspiring young artists.