Roy Lichtenstein Quotes

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.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesnt look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

There 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.

Organized perception is what art is all about.

I'm never drawing the object itself; I'm only drawing a depiction of the object - a kind of crystallized symbol of it.

Pop Art is industrial painting. 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.

Im not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. 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.

Use the worst colour you can find in each place - it usually is the best.

I'd always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn't.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

What interests me is to paint the kind of antisensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. 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.

Outside is the world; it's there. Pop Art looks out into the world.

My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world.

I take a cliche and try to organize its forms to make it monumental. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial.

The big tradition, I think, is unity. And I have that in mind; and with that, you know, you could break all the traditions- all the other so-called rules, because they are stylistic.. and most are not true. As long as the marks are related to one another, there is unity. Unity in the work itself depends on unity of the artist's vision.

We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. There’s something terribly brittle about it. 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. 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.

I think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?

But 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.

All my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons.

My work sanitizes it (emotion) but it is also symbolic of commercial art sanitizing human feelings. I think it can be read that way.... 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.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

The things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire.

Im interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think its the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really cant be this way.

I 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.

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.

Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.

Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about.

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.

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.

Painting stems from a sense of organisation, the sensed positions of contrasts. Not that it is about this.

Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about. There is almost nothing you can say that holds up as a generalization, because it depends on too many factors: size, modulation, the rest of the field, a certain consistency that color has with forms, and the statement you're trying to make.

Picasso'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.

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.

I dont have big anxieties. I wish I did. Id be much more interesting.

I don't think that I'm over his influence but they probably don't look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.

You know, as you compose music, you're just off in your own world. You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People think one-point and two-point perspective is how the world actually looks, but of course, it isn't. It's a convention.

In America the biggest is the best.

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. 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.

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.

I was at Rutgers University, and that was a center for Fluxus in a way. But it wasn't what I was interested in. All 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.

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.