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.
ROY LICHTENSTEINWe’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.
ROY LICHTENSTEINA number of artists have done things with Mickey Mouse – including Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. He’s such an American symbol, and such an anti-art symbol.
ROY LICHTENSTEINBut 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.
ROY LICHTENSTEINThere is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir? and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.
ROY LICHTENSTEINWhen I met Steve Kaufman, I thought he was Gene Simmons, but what an artist talent he is. He will be an art force in the art world to deal with.
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 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 LICHTENSTEINThere must be something about art… almost all cultures have done art. It’s a refining of the senses, which are there to keep us alive. As far as we know, no other animals do that.
ROY LICHTENSTEINThere is almost nothing you can say that holds up as a generalization, because it depends on too many factors: size, modulation, the rest of the field, a certain consistency that color has with forms, and the statement you’re trying to make.
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 LICHTENSTEINPicasso’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.
ROY LICHTENSTEINI don’t think that I’m over his influence but they probably don’t look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.
ROY LICHTENSTEINYou have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.
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 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.
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 LICHTENSTEIN