Roy Lichtenstein is a dirty rat!

In a pretty interesting twist this week,w e were assigned the task of re-imaging (Or re-imagining) a visual we had worked with before. We needed to show or revision next to the original and then explain ehy we chose them and what was at work there.  So here  they are. Roy Lichtenstein's original is on the left.

Now, they seem pretty similar side by side like that. I zoomed in on her face becasue there seems to be so much guilt on her face. I really wanted to focus on that. To discuss the question why the artist framed the image the way he did we need some quick historical context.

Roy L was a very successful painter in his own right, but the image above directly lifted  by him from a comic book by Tony Abruzzo called "Young Romance". He projected a blown up version of the panel onto a canvas and painted it. Now, Lichtenstein selected the single image from  god knows how many, but the painting itself was a straight replication.

The visual intensity of the image is incredibly powerful. The emotion is boiling over. The lines on the man's flesh show her grip to be so tight it's almost smothering him. In my zoom in, I focused on the softer curves in that portion of the image to make the intensity less immediate and put the attention on the rounded tears in her eyes.

I hate to criticize a buck-eye made good like Roy Lichtenstein, but what he was able to accomplish using "inspiration" from others has always been somewhat uncomfortable to me. In fact, to read an article written by Don Marksten on Roy Lichtenstein's methods and his personal issues with a cartoonist named Irving Novick, click here.