Flower Piece I 1994

Richard Hamilton made this ‘Flower Piece I’ with watercolour; you can tell he’s working wet-on-wet. It gives everything this hazy, dreamlike quality, as though the image is trying to come into focus. I love how he uses the watercolour. It's fluid, kind of out of control, yet precise. Look at the way the pinks and reds bleed into each other in the flowers, and how the greens and yellows in the fruit create this juicy, luscious feel. The whole thing feels very immediate, like he's capturing a fleeting moment. Then there's this weird jolt of reality with the Andrex toilet paper in the foreground. It's such a mundane object, but Hamilton puts it right there in the middle, challenging our sense of what’s important or beautiful. It’s like he is asking us if we have to choose. Hamilton was a Pop artist, and you can see that influence here. Think of Warhol's soup cans, or Lichtenstein's comic strips. They took everyday objects and made them into art, and that's what Hamilton's doing with the Andrex roll.