Mustard on White 1963

This is Roy Lichtenstein's "Mustard on White," made sometime in the mid-20th century, and it's like a comic book panel blown up to monumental scale. The way he lays down that mustard, thick with yellow, feels so deliberate, so posed. You know, like he’s conducting an experiment on the very nature of painting. There's something so satisfying about how Lichtenstein deals with surface and texture. Look at the Benday dots, that mechanical pattern mimicking printed images; they make the whole painting vibrate. The flat, bold colours and hard outlines seem like they should flatten the image out, but instead, they give the scene an unexpected depth. That little dab of mustard, caught at the end of the knife, seems to hold the key to everything. Thinking about Pop Art, Lichtenstein, and this picture of mustard on toast, reminds me a bit of Wayne Thiebaud, but where Thiebaud is all about the lusciousness of paint, Lichtenstein goes in the opposite direction. He keeps it simple, hard-edged, a meditation on how we see and what we choose to look at.