“Warhol vs NFTs”

I originally wrote about this on my Facebook page when I first publicly posted this in March, I’ll repost what I wrote there…

“A concept mashup as part of my homage portrait assignment as a homage to Warhol's "Marilyn Diptych" and a criticism over NFTs and their randomly generated garbage for nothing but sheer profit, something I feel Warhol himself would be against.

This started life as a self shot photograph and I seperated the highlights and lowlights in Photoshop using a Posterise filter, and created the separate images (which was harder than it looks).”

“Warhol vs NFTs” - Copyright Simon Haynes 2022

It wouldn’t be a satisfying blog post if there wasn’t some sort of insight into this picture, especially five months on, but in all honesty I was never 100% happy with the result from a technical point of view.

Part of me wanted to keep the palette as restricted as possible, ideally around 4, but my original goal was to have more repeated colours in an image, however this didn’t work due to the nature of the photo and an early decision to keep the skin tone consistent; it honestly just looked weird having a multi colour skin tone and moved a little away from Warhol’s work to a degree.

Ultimately it became a game of trying to come up with different vibrant colours to fill out the 5 by 5 grid… which lead to the other logistical headache of trying extremely hard to not repeat too many visually similar placements.

I might try to recreate this image with the more restricted colour palette and have the flesh tones be as random as the other two elements, but the other consideration was to also create a 10 x 10 image as well to further randomise the image and heighten the absurdity and also reduce the human elements further.

I have also considered having this printed on acrylic to hang on a wall, but that feels a little too ego driven.

S