Bedroom at Arles 1992

Roy Lichtenstein made this "Bedroom at Arles" with oil and magna on canvas, taking Van Gogh’s humble room and reinterpreting it through his signature pop art filter. What jumps out is the graphic punch—the flatness, the bold outlines, and those Ben-Day dots. Look how Lichtenstein simplifies everything into blocks of color and pattern. The wood grain of the floor, the stripes on the wall, the dots on the other, all these flattenings of space. It’s like he's saying, “Hey, this is a painting, not reality.” This focus on the artificiality of the image makes you see the world as something constructed. And yet, through this comic book lens, Lichtenstein brings a kind of clarity and humor. The dots, for instance, they aren't just decoration. They are the very building blocks of the image. They become a metaphor for how we perceive, how we break down an image into its most basic components and then reassemble it in our minds. It reminds me of David Hockney and his photographic collages, where he took multiple photos of a scene and pieced them together, showing us that seeing is an active process. Art is always a conversation, a game of telephone across time.