Portrait 1989

This is Roy Lichtenstein's "Portrait," and it's a wild ride of color and form. You can almost feel the artist's hand at play here, building up the image through layers of brushstrokes and those iconic Ben-Day dots. I like to imagine Lichtenstein in the studio, wrestling with the push and pull of representation and abstraction. What does a portrait even mean when it's broken down into these vibrant, almost cartoonish shapes? Those thick, juicy strokes of red, green, and yellow feel so immediate, so full of energy, but they're also carefully placed, considered. There's a real tension between spontaneity and control that I find super compelling. It makes you wonder how Lichtenstein saw himself in relation to the Abstract Expressionists, like de Kooning. Were they really so different? Ultimately, artists are always talking to each other, across time and space, riffing on each other's ideas, and pushing the boundaries of what painting can be. It’s painting at its most embodied, a record of thought and feeling, with space left for ambiguity.