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Drowning Girl
Roy Lichtenstein is definitely one of my favorite artists, known most famously for his Pop Art paintings in comic book style. I was actually introduced to his paintings when I visited the National Museum of Art in Washington D.C., and I’ve loved his work ever since. Lichtenstein captures these cartoon scenarios and makes them larger than life as well as tranforms them into a more realistic context, as if these comic book characters and speech bubbles represented snapshots of a regular person’s daily life struggles.
In order to paint in a comic book style, Roy Lichtenstein’s 1963 Drowning Girl,for example, is illustrated with a half tone. A half tone is a reprographic technique that contains a continuous tone of the same color broken into binary images, or what you see as these dots. All of the dots are the same color, but when they vary in size of spacing, the “half tone” creates the optical illusion of different shades and values of color.
Lichtenstein’s dots look stimulating to the eye both up close and far away in this 67 5/8 x 66 3/4″ oil painting, catching a woman in emotional distress and shouting, “I don’t care! I’d rather sink than call Brad for help!” I love how Lichtenstein controls both the dramatic and the familiar in his style, exposing a scene like Drowning Girl at such a large scale to bring light to some of our trivial problems in everyday life.
