Edutainment > Roy Lichtenstein 1923-1997 - Citations

Roy Lichtenstein - Biography
Women Flower No. 3
copyright Wen Mujiang and Yin Xiurong

Roy Lichtenstein was an intelligent, witty and overt commentator of his own art. What he says gives a better understanding what Pop Art is all about.

For copyright reasons we cannot show you original artwork by Roy Lichtenstein on this page. Instead you see art prints by contemporary Chinese artists Wen Mujiang, born 1970 and Yin Xiurong - born 1987.

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Citations by Roy Lichtenstein

Andy Warhol - Biography
Women Flower No. 2
copyright Wen Mujiang and Yin Xiurong

"But my work is not about form. It's about seeing. I'm excited about seeing things and I'm interested in the way I think other people saw things. I suppose "seeing" at its most profound level may be synonymous with form, or rather form is the result of unified seeing."

"Pop might be a difficult starting point for a painter. He would have great difficulty in making these brittle images yield to compositional purposes. ...Interaction between painter and painting is not the total commitment of Pop, but it is still a major concern - though concealed and strained."

"I had trouble with the brush-strokes too: they looked like slices of bacon or something, they really did not look anything like brush-strokes when I started. And I got this idea that I would use India ink on acetate and make a brush-stroke, because the acetate kind of repels the ink. And then I would copy, I would draw pictures of those and it was just a way of getting an idea for a brush-stroke. It had more interest than I could get by trying to dream one up."

"Anyway, the dots can have a purely decorative meaning, or they can mean an industrial way of extending the color, or data information, or finally that the image is a fake. .... I think those are the meanings the dots have taken on, but I am not really sure if I have not made all this up."

"I am trying to make the drawing as powerful as possible. I start with the color, which I have already visualized, but it usually changes, because the drawing that I have done is not really like the painting. The quality of the colored pencil is not the same as the paint. Also the thickness of lines changes. Because of the dots and the diagonal lines and unmodulated color, I work in a color key that I love to play with. I try to make it different from painting to painting. You do whatever is required to make more of a color or make it brighter or duller or whatever you have to do to give you the sense of wholeness."

Dieter Wanczura
(March 2002, updated October 2009)

Literature source used for this article about Roy Lichtenstein

• Roy Lichtenstein, exhibition catalog of the foundation Beyeler, 1998, ISBN 3-905632-02-0

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