Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms.
ROY LICHTENSTEINAll of it had an impact – as did happenings – because I could see that art was changing from expressionism, which I was doing at the time, or thought I was doing. But it wasn’t the direction I really wanted to go.
More Roy Lichtenstein Quotes
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I think its the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really cant be this way.
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We’re not living in a school-of-Paris world, you know, and the things we really see in America are like this. It’s McDonald’s, it’s not Le Corbusier.
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I don’t think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.
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Pop Art is industrial painting.
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I think the meaning of my work is that it is industrial, it’s what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, it won’t be American; it will be universal.
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Outside is the world; it’s there. Pop Art looks out into the world.
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Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about.
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Picasso’s always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.
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The big tradition, I think, is unity. And I have that in mind; and with that, you know, you could break all the traditions- all the other so-called rules, because they are stylistic.. and most are not true.
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I’m never drawing the object itself; I’m only drawing a depiction of the object – a kind of crystallized symbol of it.
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My work isn’t about form. It’s about seeing. I’m excited about seeing things, and I’m interested in the way I think other people see things.
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I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter.
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I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it’s very hard to guess at a size or a color and the colors around it and what it will really look like. It’s only a guess at the beginning, and then I try to refine it.
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Painting stems from a sense of organisation, the sensed positions of contrasts. Not that it is about this.
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I take a cliche and try to organize its forms to make it monumental. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial.
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People mistake the character of line for the character of art. But it’s really the position of line that’s important, or the position of anything, any contrast, not the character of it.
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There are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art. We’re using those things – but we’re not really advocating stupidity, international teenagerism, and terrorism.
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My direction is very anti-contemplative. If you thought I was for commercial products, you’d think there was no irony. The irony isn’t meant to be an ironic comment on our society, exactly.
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But usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes.
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Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist.
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Yeah, you know, you like it to come on like gangbusters, but you get into passages that are very interesting and subtle, and sometimes your original intent changes quite a bit.
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Use the worst colour you can find in each place – it usually is the best.
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I was at Rutgers University, and that was a center for Fluxus in a way. But it wasn’t what I was interested in.
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I’d always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn’t.
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I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward – neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn’t look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.
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What interests me is to paint the kind of antisensitivity that impregnates modern civilization.
ROY LICHTENSTEIN