Andy's Shoes

After looking at all those arty shoes for Tuesday’s post about the flower show, it reminded me of some of my favorite shoe art: that of Andy Warhol.  Yes, Andy Warhol of the soup cans—he did shoes too!  In fact, he did shoes first.  According to the Tate (who knows this stuff):

Shoes played a prominent role in Warhol’s early career as a commercial artist. His 1950s adverts for women’s footwear were well recognised and his fetish for shoes and feet continued throughout his life. In the 1980s he returned to the motif as a source of inspiration for a series of screenprints which incorporated diamond dust, the by-product created during the making of industrial grade diamonds.

Diamond dust?  Come on, that’s awesome.  Those later prints look like this:

It kind of looks like a colorful X-ray, doesn’t it?  And just imagine it with diamond dust… sorry, got lost for a second there in thoughts of shoes covered in diamond dust.  This particular poster from Art.com is only $15 for a 13” x 9”, though, so no diamonds here.

Prefer it bigger?  Here’s a 31.5” x 23.5”:

That blue silhouette in the lower left—it’s my favorite!  This poster will run you $47 from Shop.com.

But it’s Warhol’s early prints that I love the most.

This one from 1955 is called Green and Yellow, and the caption is just as adorable as the shoe: “Shoe bright, shoe light, first shoe I’ve seen tonight.”  (When I have children, I am using this rhyme.)  A 16” x 13” giclee print is $35 from Art.com.

“You can lead a shoe to water but you can’t make it drink.”  I sort of wish this shoe was real, this double-strap brocade Mary Jane.  I guess I’ll have to settle for the poster.  The 17” x 22” costs $24 at the Warhol Store—the official store of Pittsburgh’s own Warhol Museum!

And there’s a book, people!  HE WROTE A BOOK.

It’s forty drawings, watercolors, and prints accompanied by his little remarks about shoes.  And can I also say how the subtitle is “The Autobiography of Alice B. Shoe”?  Love.  Yours for $13 on Amazon.

Art + shoes = joy.  On that note, happy Friday!

Sales this weekend:

Sorry ladies; I’m away for work this week and haven’t been able to check.  I have every confidence you can ferret out the sales in my absence!