"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"
About this Quote
Lichtenstein is describing a workflow that sounds almost timid on the surface - "fairly sure", "before I really committed" - but it’s actually a manifesto for Pop’s cool-headed audacity. The line reveals an artist treating the canvas less like a sacred site of inspiration and more like a test bench. He starts with drawing (the old, respectable discipline), then interrupts it with collage elements: printed dots, painted paper, “or something.” That casual shrug is doing work. It frames industrial-looking materials not as a gimmick but as a practical tool for thinking.
The specific intent here is control without pretense. Lichtenstein wants the image to feel inevitable, but he doesn’t pretend it arrives whole. Collage becomes a rehearsal space: a way to audition surfaces, textures, and the mechanical look of mass printing before locking the composition in place. In a movement often caricatured as celebrating consumer culture, you can hear the real obsession: mediation. The painting isn’t just an image; it’s an image of an image, engineered to feel like it came off a press even when it’s painstakingly handmade.
The subtext is anxiety about authorship, disguised as method. “Commitment” implies stakes: once paint goes down, the work declares what it is. Collage delays that declaration, letting him toggle between art-school draftsmanship and the borrowed language of comics and advertising. Context matters: postwar America, where images arrived prepackaged, repeatable, and loud. Lichtenstein’s genius was to make that repeatability look like a choice - and to show, quietly, how much labor it took to make the mechanical feel real.
The specific intent here is control without pretense. Lichtenstein wants the image to feel inevitable, but he doesn’t pretend it arrives whole. Collage becomes a rehearsal space: a way to audition surfaces, textures, and the mechanical look of mass printing before locking the composition in place. In a movement often caricatured as celebrating consumer culture, you can hear the real obsession: mediation. The painting isn’t just an image; it’s an image of an image, engineered to feel like it came off a press even when it’s painstakingly handmade.
The subtext is anxiety about authorship, disguised as method. “Commitment” implies stakes: once paint goes down, the work declares what it is. Collage delays that declaration, letting him toggle between art-school draftsmanship and the borrowed language of comics and advertising. Context matters: postwar America, where images arrived prepackaged, repeatable, and loud. Lichtenstein’s genius was to make that repeatability look like a choice - and to show, quietly, how much labor it took to make the mechanical feel real.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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