Ruins 1965

Roy Lichtenstein made ‘Ruins,’ a painting that's now in the Russian Museum, out of oil and magna on canvas. Look at that field of blue dots sitting above a wide yellow plane, a broken classical ruin, and a column on the right. Lichtenstein, maybe he was thinking about history, mass production, and how images circulate. I wonder, what was it like to make a painting like this? Each dot, meticulously placed, must have taken ages! I imagine Lichtenstein making these deadpan, stylized, but also monumental works. There's something weirdly cool about his work, that combination of flatness and depth, like staring into an abyss of Ben-Day dots. Painting, like anything, it's a back-and-forth, a constant conversation with art history, and, of course, with the future too.