PopArt Authors' Story

One day in 2018, while musing on the colored patterns in old 90’s sitcoms – specifically in the opening of The Fresh Prince of Bel-air - Alyssa started drifting back and forth between those patterns and on the floors of movie theaters, and that somehow ended up working through to Warhol’s pop art portraits. The combination of these thoughts – the patterns and the portraits using primary colors rather than skin tones – slowly evolved in her head, until finally, almost one year after the weird day dreaming visions occurred, Alyssa put paint to canvas and came up for air with the first of the PopArt Authors: Jane Austen. Like a drug, the portraits became addictive, and the use of vibrant colors to express the depth of connection between those so in love with literature became so much more than the original doodles and ideas. The importance of the works provided to generations by all the authors already painted and yet to come transcend their deaths in a vibrance Alyssa considers similar to those that she uses to portray them: their moral lessons and major concerns addressed in their work are as essential to the human condition as color is to our visual of life. What would we be without red in a stop light, or a continued reminder of historical tragedy as represented by Hawthorne? Colors allow humanity to differentiate as well as to express ourselves the way literature allows us to connect to those who have come before us and learn from them. patterns.