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Keith Haring is an inspirational artist who used a lot of symbolism in his art work. Some famous ones would include the crawling baby, barking dog, etc. as shown in the image below. His interest in art started at a young age with his father teaching him basic cartooning skills. Keith Haring also learned from popular culture like Dr. Seuss and Walt Disney. As he grew older, his inspiration came from the innovation and energy of his contemporaries in New York City; things like the graffiti that was present everywhere. His love of children later inspired his artworks. Artists that influenced his work were Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Alechinsky, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit and Andy Warhol’s Running Fence.
Like Keith Haring, I tried to incorporate simple use of color and line. I also tried to use symbolism of objects to project a deeper message. In my painting you can see red hands, dollar bills, and dollar bills making up the Earth. The hands represent the greed and lust humanity has for wealth. They're red because it's a powerful color that is usually used to depict a powerful emotion. Greed is a considerably powerful emotion because it has the power to make people act absurd. The hands are savagely reaching down trying to grab as much money as possible. The dollar bills don't just represent wealth in terms of money, but whatever you may place value into. The big red hands pulling back on the Earth would be you trying to defend your wealth. I'm not implying that everyone is guilty of selfishness, but I think it's safe to say that the majority of people have some sort of lust and would prefer to keep their wealth.
It was really difficult working at a large scale because EVERYTHING had to be painted in evenly, in the same direction, and in the same texture. I was also faced with the challenge of only being allowed to use the primary colors red, yellow, and blue. Any of the other colors had to be produced myself such as the orange of the background and the green of the dollar bills. This was a challenge because I had to reproduce the same exact color each time I worked on the painting. Acrylic was a bit new to me, so trying to keep control of the brush and paint was fun to experiment with.
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| -Keith Haring work- |
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