Figure in Landscape 1977

This is a painting by Roy Lichtenstein, who was a famous Pop artist. Looking at this, I’m thinking about cartooning and abstraction and how they crash into each other. That big white shape is so odd, like a deflated balloon animal, floating between the yellow ground and those blue lines above, which could be a sky, or wallpaper, I dunno. It’s as if Lichtenstein wanted to invent a new kind of symbol, one that isn’t so easy to pin down. What do you think the figure is thinking? That hard black outline, it's like the whole thing’s been Xeroxed, or printed, and then slightly misregistered—which, come to think of it, is a fitting metaphor for painting itself. It's always a bit of a mistake, always a bit off, but sometimes that's where the magic lies.