Sleeping Girl 1964

Roy Lichtenstein made this painting, Sleeping Girl, with oil and magna on canvas. He reduces this woman to these graphic elements, yellow hair, black outlines, and those signature Benday dots that mimic the printing process. I love how Lichtenstein takes something as intimate as a sleeping face and turns it into a mass-produced image. The way he flattens the space and simplifies the forms makes you think about how we consume images, how we turn people into icons. Look at the dots on her face. They create a texture that's both abstract and representational. Up close, they're just dots, but from a distance, they create the illusion of skin tone, of shadow. It’s like he’s saying, "Hey, this is just paint on canvas, but it's also so much more." It makes me think of Warhol and his screen prints, but Lichtenstein has a graphic punch all of his own. Ultimately the process reveals the work, and yet the work reveals the process.