I think you go nuts when you get older.
— Roy Lichtenstein
Picasso's sculpture has incredible strength combined with a lack of pomposity.
Pollock really invented something. No one painted like him - or de Kooning or Still.
I don't think that my art isn't serious. I think the subjects are not serious, or my treatments of the subjects are not serious. But then, I'm also putting down subject, because like the abstract expressionists, I don't think the subject is important.
I think art was the one thing my high school didn't give. And I think that was probably one reason why I was interested in it.
We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. There's something terribly brittle about it.
Something terrible can happen in my life, but I wouldn't put it in my art.
I think there's the apparent lack of subtlety and sort of make-believe anti-sensibility connected with American art. I think this is a style, and it does relate to our culture, and I think it would be anachronistic maybe to pretend to be involved with subtle changes and modulations and things like that, because it's really not part of America.
You know, as you compose music, you're just off in your own world. You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.
Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.
I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.
But usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes.
Personally, I feel that in my own work I wanted to look programmed or impersonal but I don't really believe I am being impersonal when I do it. And I don't think you could do this.
I'm interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think it's the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really can't be this way.
I don't have big anxieties. I wish I did. I'd be much more interesting.
I wasn't sure pop art or my work would last more than six months.
The importance of art is in the process of doing it, in the learning experience where the artist interacts with whatever is being made.
When I was going to school and under the influence of Abstract Expressionism, I believed that if you had a give-and-take rapport with your work that it would be you, and that would be all that was required. It would be honest, and the core of your personality would come out if you responded to position and contrasts in your work.
I thought art was a sort of romantic life, or I don't know what I thought art was like. But I learned practically everything I know from Ohio State. And I'm really glad I went.
Everybody has called Pop Art 'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting.
Actually, I love the Abstract Expressionists - or I like the ones I like, anyway.
I've never done an anguished painting.
I'm excited about seeing things, and I'm interested in the way I think other people saw things.
Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.
I think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?
I don't think that I'm over his influence but they probably don't look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.
Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.
In America the biggest is the best.
I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.
The U.S. museums weren't looking at my paintings at all - they hated them, irredeemably. People metaphorically threw up when they saw my work! They thought I was enlarging comics, or just copying them.
I don't think there is any question that Picasso is the greatest figure of the 20th century.
Making something good and saying something brilliant are not two things. When you make your own statement, there is a higher energy level, and you do better painting.
When I started to do these Pop paintings seriously, I used all these other paintings - the abstract ones - as mats. I was painting in the bedroom, and I put them on the floor so I wouldn't get paint on the floor. They got destroyed.
I drew as a child, they tell me. I can vaguely remember doing it. And then I drew again in the late years at high school.
I don't know why you'd want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I'm always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We're both saying something we want to be true.
When I have used cartoon images, I've used them ironically to raise the question, 'Why would anyone want to do this with modern painting?'
I'm trying to make paintings like giant musical chords, with a polyphony of colours that is nuts but works.
My work isn't about form. It's about seeing.
Yeah, you know, you like it to come on like gangbusters, but you get into passages that are very interesting and subtle, and sometimes your original intent changes quite a bit.
I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter.
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.
There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.
I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.
I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.
Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.
