Vitas Gerulaitis 1977

Andy Warhol made this painting of Vitas Gerulaitis, and you can see he’s used bold, flat colors and a screen printing technique to create an image that feels both familiar and slightly unreal. I imagine Warhol approaching the canvas with a sense of playful experimentation. He’s laying down these blocks of color – the bright blue background, the peachy skin tone, the vivid red of the tennis shirt – and then adding those graphic black lines to define the details of the image. Look closely, and you can see how the colors overlap and bleed into each other, creating a kind of visual vibration. It’s like Warhol is inviting us to reconsider how we see the world around us, to find the beauty and intrigue in the everyday images that we often take for granted. There's a conversation happening between him and other artists and between all of us who make and see art. Painting lets us embrace ambiguity, and find meaning together.