Friday, January 18, 2008

Whaam!



This is Lichtenstein's most famous work. It is called "Whaam!" and was drawn directly from a comic book panel. This drawing is much larger than the original format though. The painting is five feet tall and about ten feet long. The colors are also bolder than they were in the original comic book. The dialogue and the positioning of all the objects remains the same though. The lines are all very accentuated and bold and make the image of the explosion and the plane look like they pop out of the page.

Roy Lichtenstein

My second artist for January is more famous than the last one. His name is Roy Lichenstein, he was born on October 27th, 1923 and died on September 29th, 1997. He was the most famous of all the "pop" artists of the 1950s and 1960s. His art was heavily influenced by comic artists. His paintings look very iconic, and the colors are bright and bold, with many of them looking like newsprint. He went to Ohio State University for a few years but was drafted into World War II from 1943-1946. After that he became a professor at Rutgers University. In 1964 he began to work on his famous works using oil and magna paint. His most famous work was "Whaam!" which he created in 1963. His most famous work was heavily influenced by 1960s comic books, and they were often large-scale recreations of comic book panels from comics of the time. In 1965 he largely stopped creating comic book influenced work and started work on more abstract media. In the 1970s his artwork was surreal and very abstract. He died in 1997 of pnuemonia.