Flowers (F. & S. II.118)
Flowers (F. & S. II.118)
Signed Print
Andy Warhol
Screenprint, 1974
Signed Print Edition of 250
H 104cm x W 69cm
Critical Review
Flowers (F. & S. II.118) is a screen print by Andy Warhol hand coloured with Dr. Martin’s aniline watercolour dye, from his Flowers (Hand-Coloured) series (1974). The print is representative of Warhol’s more contemplative and illustrative style, showing a line drawing of a vase of flowers, coloured in subdued pink hues.
Using loose, gestural lines in black to contour and shaded parts of the image, Warhol alludes to the artist’s personal touch to transcend the ‘machine-like’ aesthetic that many of his other works exemplify. In contrast to his earlier Flowers series’ from 1964 and 1970, this print maintains a delicate hand-drawn quality that harks back to his early career in fashion illustration. Returning again and again to the subject of flowers throughout his career in a multitude of ways, this particular print has a clear focus on composition, colour and line, noted for its looseness in style.
For this series, Warhol abandoned his photographic print technique and instead used an opaque projector to copy from wallpaper samples and images from the book Interpretative Flower Designs by Mrs Raymond Rus Stolz. By stripping it of its contextual landscape and leaving the backdrop as a plain white colour field, he abstracts the original source material in a way that creates tension between representation and reality.
