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 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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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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Pop Art is industrial painting.
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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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We like to think of industrialization as being despicable.
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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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When 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.
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All my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons.
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Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about.
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A 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.
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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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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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Im interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art.
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But 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.
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I think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?
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I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.
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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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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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You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.
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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 all the colors around it and what it will really look like.
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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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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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Personally, 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.
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There 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.
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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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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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And I dont really want it to carry one. Im not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.
ROY LICHTENSTEIN