The diagram is maybe a good word
for the way I represent other artists
That may be true of cartooning
That it tends to be a diagram of a person
It seems to depict by outlining
delineating in a simple way
what a subject is
<The studio was his favourite place
It was the idea that he could actually
come down and play
Sometimes he just liked to come down
and even clean his paintbrushes
And look around at the work he was doing
at that time
Roy kept a pretty regular schedule
He was usually in the studio by 10
had the same thing for breakfast single morning
Broke for lunch
Came back and worked
It wasn't like: ' I have to go to work today,
God I have to paint today'
Nothing
It was his joy, it was his pleasure
It was everything
Sometimes I'd go to the studio in Southhamptom
And he'd be alone in the studio
I'd sit in a little chair and watch him work
And I thought I'd be distracting.
No. I'd watch him work
He was just focused
Nothing could distract him
He never really dreamed that he
would be able to support himself
Through just painting
That was something that made him truly happy
<So the question of the hour is:
How are you going to work in Rome?
I'm going to do some drawing and thinking
and mostly eating I think
[laughs]
<He was exactly, the first day I met him,
to the day I never saw him again
the same way
Easy-going, charming,
He wasn't judgemental
< I was working at the Bianchini Gallery
in New York and we and exhibition called:
'The Great American Supermarket'
And thought: wouldn't it be great
if instead of a regular poster, we could get
Roy Lichtenstein and Andrew Warhol
To put an image on a shopping bag
They both agreed
and I met Roy in 1964
when he came in to sign the shopping bags
< Well it was 64, so he was pretty well known
He was an internationally known artist
There was still great controversy
It was in the air
'Is Pop Art serious? Is it this? 'Is it Art?
All that stuff was still up there
A lot of people were upset about it
The Abstract Expressionists must have felt
pretty upset because they saw their
whole anguish of the world vanish
in this ironic and witty
and beautifully done work
< What I did in these early paintings was
frightening to me really
It seemed to go counter to a sense of taste
I had developed along with I hope a sense of art
Except I knew it had meaning and I knew
vey shortly that it had more meaning
then the things I had done before
But, because it was so different
it was really frightening
< He as not a fan of comics
It was the nature of the cartoon
it just seemed as far away from
an artistic image as you can get and to try
and transform that into a formal painting
really appealed to him
He also found it impossible to go back
to doing what he had been doing
I must say, he never quite managed
to get the tormented look in those paintings
He wasn't the tortured artist
He used to joke and say he was going to
take curmudgeon lessons
[laughs]
When Roy was in Ohio State
he had an art professor, Hoyt Sherman
who was a huge influence on him
Talked all about ways of seeing and perception
He had methods of teaching where he
flashed slides in a dark room really quickly
and had people sketch them so that they
could get the Holmes or Gestalt of the work
That really had a major impact on Roy
< When I turn the work upside down
it's to obliterate the subject
or to resense it
Think of it more as pure mark
then you can subject
You can see it clearly if you look at it through
a mirror because it reverses everything
and anything you don't want if doubly off
because it's the other way around
It's almost the same as coming back two weeks later
and looking at it and you see what is off then
Art is about something that is entirely
different from what my original sources were
and I like the contradiction
I think people mistake the character of line
for the character of art
But it is really the position of the line
that is important or the position
of anything, any contrast
not the character of it
Anything that was kind of high flung
always amused him and
And he himself just had a natural humility really
< I paint the pictures and he sells them
as that. What could be better
It's pretty simple
I try to be a little more complicated
But not too much.
I would say that there are
several kinds of relationships
that can exist between a dealer and a painter
The best one is the one of friendship
and that's what my relationship is to Lichtenstein
That's true
< Leo Castelli was his dealer for his entire life
from 1961 until his death
They trusted each other completed
They never had a contract
As Roy started to become more successful
and better known
He used to joke and say
someone is going to be tapping him and say:
'Mr. Lichtenstein, it's time for your pills'
And he would be in a wheelchair and
with his hat cockeyed on his head
and he would still be living in Oswego in New York
snowed in and this will all have been a dream