richard huntington

AFTER ROY LICHTENSTEIN

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I was doing dots anyway ​so I thought, Who is the ultimate master of dots of our day? The sadly departed Roy Lichtenstein, obviously. I took a few of his magnificent  images that I had seen in the big Lichtenstein retrospective in Chicago --huge canvases --and re-did them in modest scale with a quick stencil-based treatment, indifferent to careful technique and finally painterly in marked contrast to Lichtenstein's regal, polished aesthetic. Here the master's neat ben-day-dot patterns  became more like a complex of  little blobs and splotches, echoing Seurat on a bad day as much as Lichtenstein. In my hands, the  clean drawing of the original figures was applied to  disproportionate characters of slightly unsavory demeanor. And in some cases the cool eroticism of Lichtenstein's women took a turn toward the expressively vulgar, a turnabout of his typical shearing away of  any signs of up-front emotion in his re-doing of Picasso, Matisse and other modern masters. Later, as an afterthought, a couple of the images were rendered in cut paper, drawn over and printed.                                                                                                                              Woman on Telephone (After Roy Lichtenstein), acrylic, 2011
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From the left. clockwise: Blonde with Pearl Necklace (After Roy Lichtenstein), acrylic on canvas, 2010; Two Woman 1 (After Roy Lichtenstein), acrylic on paper, 2010;  Two Women 4, (after Roy Lichtenstein), acrylic on canvas, 2020; Two Women< Gray, cut paper, 2011.