Roy Lichtenstein pulled off his idea of irony comic illustration with one of his first popular art piece of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck on a wooden jetty. Donald Duck raises his fishing rod and shouts out: ” Look Mickey, I’ve hooked a big one”. This painting somehow challenged the Abstract Expressionism artists which was dominated American art during that time.
Lichtenstein was born in New York City, he showed his artistic really early. Lichtenstein drew, painted and sculpted as a teenager, and he also spent lots of his time in the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Modern Art. Later on, he spent sometimes in Europe but then returned home due to his father illness.
Lichtenstein was identified with Pop art, he interested in industrial processes and mass consumerism. He form his career on creating simple works that appropriated from comic books, advertisements and pulp fiction, isolating, cropping and enlarging selected elements to form power-full composition. More over, he also imitate the crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction as you can see with the dots on his art works. Lichtenstein creates about more than 5000 painting, prints, drawings, sculptures, murals and other objects.
To be more specific, Lichtenstein’s works based on enlarged panels from comic books. Lichtenstein himself said ” I am nominally copying, but I am really restating the copied thing in other term. In doing that, the original acquires a totally different texture. It isn’t thick or thin brushstrokes, it’s dots and flat colours and unyielding lines”. He would took a tiny picture, smaller than the palm of the hand, printed in four colour inks on newsprint and blew it up to the conventional size and finished it by painting on canvas. He elevated comic art to something you would see in a gallery.
His popularity reached it peak during the 1960s with Pop painting, he gravitated toward what he would refer as ” dumbest” or ” worst” visual item he could fins and then he would attempt to improve it. Paraphrasing, particularly the paraphrasing of despised images had become a unique trait ofLichtenstein art. People love his convention or permeated art, they called his works ” a purely American mythological subject matter”.
My comment on Liechtenstein’s art: His art really catch my eyes with the vibrant palette and interesting texture. Unlike the other, his creativity is about seeing a poetical image and elevate it. When I first look at his art, I immediately think about all those meme picture since his art tend to be zoom in to a girl face with emotional face expression.
Source : https://lichtensteinfoundation.org/biography/