Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist.
ROY LICHTENSTEINYes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist.
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 LICHTENSTEINI’m never drawing the object itself; I’m only drawing a depiction of the object – a kind of crystallized symbol of it.
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 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 LICHTENSTEINPeople 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.
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 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 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 LICHTENSTEINPop Art looks out into the world. It doesnt look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.
ROY LICHTENSTEINI dont have big anxieties. I wish I did. Id be much more interesting.
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 think its the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really cant be this way.
ROY LICHTENSTEINOrganized perception is what art is all about.
ROY LICHTENSTEIN