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The Things I Notice

Posting has been light lately due to all kinds of other stuff, like travelling and writing for Hyperallergic. As an addendum to the piece that I wrote about The Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, here's something I spotted that didn't fit into the article.

In examining his seminal pop art pictures from the sixties, I noticed that the way they were painted was not completely flat, machine like, and artificial. Not only could you see variation in the brushmarks, but the sides of some of the pictures retained drips:


See that blue drip at the top left of the painting? Now look at one of the shaped canvasses that Lichtenstein was making in the last decade of his life:


Almost exactly in the same spot. It could just be a coincidence, of course. Or it could be one of those apparently insignificant things that an artist remembers, and tries to formalise in his studio practice many years after the first accident happens. In the first case, Roy must have seen the drip over the edge, but decided to leave it there precisely as a sign of human activity. Then much later, he is trying to get his shapes not just to the edge of the frame but beyond, so he constructs the shape of the stretcher to incorporate into the design what was once just a random drip.
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