The Potential of an Artist: Andy Warhol
Ashleigh Dorman

Andy Warhol has a unique image, which is seen through his abstract artwork. In “Andy Warhol: The Artist as Machine,” Paul Bergin emphasizes Warhol’s potential to be a talented, successful artist. Bergin thinks that all Warhol has to do is transform his potential into activation to make him an even more successful artist. He thinks that he should apply himself in this way not just every now and then but in every single artwork making each one memorable and irreplaceable, just like his own personal artistic image. Bergin says that Warhol’s art has some good aspects that will help him reach the status of being a brilliant artist but there are some features of his work holding him back from reaching his full potential.

According to Bergin, Andy Warhol has a gift of portraying his images in a way that catch the viewer’s attention and make them question the difference between the image Warhol has created and what the image looks like in real life. Warhol has a unique way of looking at things, such as a flower, and he recreates the image in his head then illustrates it on paper to share with the rest of the world. For example, in his artwork, Flowers, Warhol uses silk screenings on canvas to depict his vision of flowers of the twentieth century. Warhol also uses silk screenings to illustrate death-image scenes, like suicides and automobile accidents.

In his death-image paintings, Bergin describes Warhol to be the most harmonized with himself and his painting. He says that Warhol truly conveys the meaning of his painting in a way that puts him in the character of a “machine.” Warhol’s painting of wrecked car with people standing around it is used to exemplify Warhol as the “machine.” However, while Warhol excelled at portraying his strong message of cars being a danger to a human’s life in one painting, Bergin believes that he didn’t reach his full potential in creating a commercial aspect in his portraits.

Bergin uses Warhol’s painting, Liz, a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, to show the failed attempts of Warhol at creating the commercial property to be the center of his painting. The viewer of this painting is too confused and concentrated on seeing where the actual identity of Taylor is shown and where the mock image is being displayed. Bergin compares Warhol’s difficulty to clearly distinguish the line that separates the two images to himself not being able to show the difference in his own personal image versus his artistic image. His artistic image has enveloped himself and his artwork to leave his viewers with only one way of looking at him: artificially gray hair and dark glasses.

Throughout his article, Paul Bergin explains the ways that Andy Warhol’s artwork displays both good and bad aspects, which contradict in his ability to be the best talented, successful artist that he has the potential to be. Because there are the negative aspects of Warhol’s paintings affecting the final outcome of the effect of the painting on the average viewer, in general it could be said that Andy Warhol’s artwork is either good or bad. But it’s up to him to change the bad features of his paintings into better effective characteristics that better show his viewers his true artistic skill.


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