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 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 LICHTENSTEINWe like to think of industrialization as being despicable.
ROY LICHTENSTEINI think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?
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 LICHTENSTEINYou forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don’t look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.
ROY LICHTENSTEINOutside is the world; it’s there. Pop Art looks out into the world.
ROY LICHTENSTEINAll my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons.
ROY LICHTENSTEINOrganized perception is what art is all about.
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 LICHTENSTEINThe 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.
ROY LICHTENSTEINI kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it’s very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.
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 LICHTENSTEINColor is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about.
ROY LICHTENSTEINI’d always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn’t.
ROY LICHTENSTEINYou have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.
ROY LICHTENSTEIN