While he can't get the great Andy Warhol himself to do the job, the New York Post's Page Six reports that Kanye West has commissioned the artist's cousin, Monica Warhol, to create a portrait of his fiancée, Kim Kardashian.
"She's an icon. She's famous for nothing. Andy would have loved her," Monica told Page Six. "Kim is beautiful. She's so manufactured. She looks like a human Barbie."
Like her late cousin, Monica, who lives and works in Tuscon, Ariz. makes silk screen works from photographs, but unlike her cousin, does all of the work herself and doesn't delegate any tasks to hired hands.
"I never studied Andy. I never owned a book about him until about a year ago," Monica admitted, adding that she doesn't intend to mimic his style and just happens to also love working with silk screen. Ironically, she never met Andy, who died in 1987 when she was just 10-years-old and living in Pittsburgh.
"My grandfather and Andy's father were brothers," she explained. "My Aunt Betty took me to the cemetery every week, where we'd pray over Andy's grave, because my aunt said he was pretty flaky and was probably in purgatory."
Monica has created two portraits of the rapper Flo Rida, one of which appears in his music video "How I Feel," and is currently working on a likeness of Lenny Kravitz after meeting him in the Church Boutique in Los Angeles. Her relation to Andy Warhol is seemingly enough to satisfy West's quest to immortalize Kardashian in a pop culture piece of art.
"Our love story's a love story for the ages," West said in a recent interview with Us Weekly. "I felt like when we first got together, it was like a Romeo and Juliet kind of thing."
Click here to learn more about Monica Warhol and her work.
