Tourist Guide

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.

In the midst of such accredited artworks at the Museum of Modern Art, I saw a large crowd, gathered around a specific section of a wall.  Everyone had their fancy DSLRs and camera phones to get a quick snapshot of the mysterious piece and would immediately leave.  Once I made my way to the front of the crowd, there it was.  Vincent Van Gogh’s 29 x 36 1/4″ oil painting, The Starry Night hung on the wall in front of me, illuminating in symphonic silence from within the very cypress trees and moonlight sky on the canvas.

Van Gogh had painted The Starry Night in 1889 during his year at the asylum in Saint-Rémy de Provence, the most difficult time of his life.  However, through his depression and isolation, this masterpiece swirls into success, a view front out of his window with a lucid dream like quality and comforting application of materials.  Each brushstroke on the canvas feels like an intuitive decision that progressed with the painting itself and since it is done in impasto, Van Gogh adds physical movement and body to the piece with his thick application of paint.  The yellows shine at the perfect humble volume and the blues and greens danced together across the sky and throughout the village, sweeping our eyes deep into The Starry Night.

Take E or M train. Get off at 5 ave-53rd st.