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.
ROY LICHTENSTEINMy 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.
ROY LICHTENSTEINI 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.
ROY LICHTENSTEINPainting stems from a sense of organisation, the sensed positions of contrasts. Not that it is about this.
ROY LICHTENSTEINI’m never drawing the object itself; I’m only drawing a depiction of the object – a kind of crystallized symbol of it.
ROY LICHTENSTEINMy use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world.
ROY LICHTENSTEINYeah, 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.
ROY LICHTENSTEINI was at Rutgers University, and that was a center for Fluxus in a way. But it wasn’t what I was interested in.
ROY LICHTENSTEINPeople think one-point and two-point perspective is how the world actually looks, but of course, it isn’t. It’s a convention.
ROY LICHTENSTEINColor is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about.
ROY LICHTENSTEINBut when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.
ROY LICHTENSTEINUse the worst colour you can find in each place – it usually is the best.
ROY LICHTENSTEINI think its the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really cant be this way.
ROY LICHTENSTEINOutside is the world; it’s there. Pop Art looks out into the world.
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.
ROY LICHTENSTEINPersonally, I feel that in my own work I wanted to look programmed or impersonal but I don’t really believe I am being impersonal when I do it. And I don’t think you could do this.
ROY LICHTENSTEINI take a cliche and try to organize its forms to make it monumental. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial.
ROY LICHTENSTEIN