A Crush on Marilyn, an homage to Andy Warhol

 

24 x 12", acrylic on cradle aluminium panel

painting#306, 2026, black floater frame

My daughter-in-law Jessica has a fondness for vintage items and loves to visit curated retro and antique shops. During the fall of 2021, while browsing at Recollections in Salisbury, Jean-Luc sent me a photo from his phone of a vintage, amber-brown Orange Crush bottle with the message: "Would this interest you?" I immediately replied, "Yes!"

Variations of this 7-ounce Orange Crush bottle were produced by Dominion Glass (Domglas) in Canada from 1937 to 1955. The amber-brown glass was designed to protect the soda from light, preserving its delicate fruit flavour and fresh taste. The bottle has some weight to it; it is semi-opaque with a ribbed, beehive-shaped body. The sheer attention to detail and craftsmanship turns what was a mass-produced commercial object into a work of art. It sat patiently in my studio until this year.

During the summer of 2025, I spotted an Andy Warhol 2-in-1 double-sided puzzle of Marilyn Monroe made by Galison—at Dollarama, of all places. While Galison produces a whole line of puzzles, the company was originally founded in 1979 specifically to work with museums, making fine art imagery accessible on well-designed paper and gift products. Art museum shops heavily stock their boutiques with Galison products because the brand holds official licensing partnerships with major art institutions and historic estates—such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. They also maintain an expansive licensing partnership with the Andy Warhol Foundation, which has created a vast array of products based on his artwork that I have collected throughout the years.

Over the New Year, while piecing the puzzle together, the narrative for this painting came to me as a play on words for the title. I think the trigger was the lone Marilyn against the orange background, since it matches the exact colour of the diamond shape on the Crush bottle. Flipped over, the other side of the puzzle features twenty-five Marilyns against a blue background, creating a perfect complementary colour match. But would it work as a painting? Was it a substantial enough concept to paint?

While working on the photo study, I experimented with several grounding surfaces. I took a photo using a cheap, light-blue chopping board from Dollarama, which comes in an array of colours in a multi-pack. The instant I saw that blue reflected in the lower ribs of the bottle, I knew I had a winner.

The image used for this puzzle is entitled Twenty-Five Marilyns (1962, acrylic, silkscreen, ink, and pencil, 82 x 66") and is housed at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. 

Other variations of this work exist, including the one above

in the collection of the Tate Modern, London - photo taken May 1997.

For the aesthetics and symmetry of this composition, I tried to paint the Marilyns as close as possible of being identical. In Warhol's works, since the silkscreens for each colours did not always align or get completely wiped clean between impressions, no two of his Marilyns are exactly alike.

At its core, for A Crush on Marilyn, the true conceptual anchor of the piece lies in the title's double meaning. The physical vintage bottle also represents "Crush" as a commercial brand—a beautiful, heavy, Art Deco style vessel designed to be used, recycled or discarded. Marilyn Monroe was also a beautiful vessel, manufactured by the Hollywood machine and ultimately crushed by the weight of the public's obsessive, one-sided infatuation. Placing this historical bottle against her image bridges two distinct eras of design, turning ordinary commercial artifacts into a deeper commentary on nostalgia, tragedy, and the fleeting nature of fame.

This painting will be part of my two-person show with Jon Wilkinson entitled- 

''Still Lives  Silent Places'' 

held at the Fog Forest Gallery 

from October 16 - November 6, 2026.
Opening reception - Oct. 23, 2026 - from 4:30 to 6pm

Gallery hours - Thursdays and Fridays from 10 am to 5 pm or by appointment. 

To acquire this painting, please contact the gallery. 
Fog Forest Gallery
14 Bridge Street
Sackville, NB, Canada
(506) 536-9000
website- https://www.fogforestgallery.ca/