Roy Lichtenstein Quotes

Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.

I see my studio like a laboratory, where I work like an investigator - it's almost forensic. I love the discovery process in painting.

I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.

And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.

My process is really quite organic, and starting a painting is one of the best parts for me. I always start in quite a loose and free way. I often put down one ground colour to begin with and then play off that.

I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

Any innovation that is evident in my paintings is a direct result of something that happened in the course of making a print.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

I painted with acrylic paint, and the reason why I went to oil was mainly because I didn't control it. I was looking for the insecurity of it. I mean, I might have found another reason later, but at that moment, the reason was I was looking for the insecurity.

I destroy the painting as soon as I can see what it is. When I can make out something in it, I destroy it because it's no longer coming from my unconscious.

Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction.

With experience it seems to be possible to control the flow of paint, to a great extent, and I don't use - I don't use the accident - 'cause I deny the accident... it's quite different from working, say, from a still life where you set up objects and work directly from them. I do have a general notion of what I'm about and what the results will be. I approach painting in the same sense as one approaches drawing, that is, it's direct.

When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.

On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

My palette contains a warm and cool of each primary, plus four modifiers: Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Blue-Violet and Phthalo Yellow-Green just mix as I go for each painting.

I keep plastering it until it comes around to what I want, in terms of all I know and think about painting now, as well as in terms of the initial observation.

I've always had an artistic hand. I took on paint when I started falling in love with the abstract expressionists. I approached it from a physical standpoint, but I've also been honing my compositional eye through film.

What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art . . . . From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product.

As a child growing up among artists I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of the virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting.

Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.

The clean clear colours were in my head. But one day as I looked at the brown burned wood of the Shanty, I thought 'I can paint one of those dismal-coloured paintings like the men. I think just for fun I will try - all low-toned and dreary with the tree besides the door.' In my next show, 'The Shanty' went up. The men seemed to approve of it. They seemed to think that maybe I was beginning to paint. That was my only low-toned dismal-coloured painting.

Every paint-stroke takes you farther and farther away from your initial concept. And you have to be thankful for that.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.