Interior with cactus 1978

Roy Lichtenstein made Interior with cactus, an almost six by five-foot painting, using oil and magna on canvas. The painting is very graphic, with blocked-in colors and black outlines, like a page from a comic, which was very much his thing. Look at how he renders tone, using only diagonal black lines to indicate shading! He used this kind of technique to flatten the image, so it almost looks like a pattern. The cactus is just a black silhouette, but somehow, you know exactly what it is, and the chair is rendered as clean lines with a seat of diagonal stripes. There's something pretty funny about this painting. It's a very stylized way of looking at the world, like a cartoon version of Matisse.