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Hollywood has always exterted a strong visual influence on popular culture and style. When Clark Gable displayed a t-shirtless chest in "It Happened One Night," undershirt sales plummeted. When Jean Harlow appeared with her white blonde hair in 1930, hair salons all over the country profited by the surge in demand for "platinum" hair. White telephones, beds without footboards called "Hollywood Beds" and even a car called the Graham "Hollywood" based on the expired Cord body style - streamlined and modern, entered the marketplace inspired by the images of desire marketed by the Dream Factories in Hollywood, California and consumed by the masses internationally.

Only a few conventional artists included film images in their work, Reginald Marsh's representational painting of a theatre interior, Edward Hopper's usherette and a symbolic painting, "Mae West" by Salvador Dali. Dali's work influenced the illusion of space represented in films such as "Down to Earth" and Dali himself painted a backdrop for Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound."

The elevation of film stars to iconography began with the work of the photographers of Hollywood's Golden Age, the 1930's and 40's. The saturation of movie magazines in the 1930's provided a ready market for the selling of these images and it was to the studios' benefit that these larger than life people be perfected by the still and moving camera. The work of George Hurrell is recognized as symbolizing this photographic idealization.

The work of Andy Warhol in the 1960's humorously mocks star images by reducing them to repetitive flat surfaces in color which bears little relationship to reality, a depiction not unlike the public perception of their celebrity. But Warhol also wisely employs larger-than-life sizes and is aware that repetition increases impact. He cleverly has it both ways with his subjects.

The selling of "stars," motion picture performers, has always had an unplanned, unintentional byproduct - stars believing their publicity and the same media machines that cause the public to worship stars simultaneously profits by revealing their flaws. This schizophrenic conflict between image and reality; perfection and destruction; and the failure of success is what has fueled the artwork of a number of artists, myself included.

'Usherette" Reginald Marsh, 1939

"Mae West" Salvador Dali 1933-1935

"New York Movie" Edward Hopper, 1939

Gypsy Rose Lee, 1937. Photo by George Hurrell

"Turquoise Marilyn" Andy Warhol, 1962

On to Paintings/Drawings of Richard Adkins