Drowning Girl 1963

Roy Lichtenstein made 'Drowning Girl' with oil on canvas, and it's like a comic book panel blown up to a melodramatic scale. The flat blocks of color, stark outlines, and those iconic Ben-Day dots—it’s all so deliberate. Look at the way he renders the water. The simple, bold lines give the impression of waves, but it’s totally artificial. That hand reaching up, fingers splayed, is also so stylised. It reminds me of how we try to control our feelings, simplify them, even though they’re a total mess of unpredictable stuff. The colors, limited to blues, reds, and yellows, enhance this artificiality. I am drawn to the starkness of it, and the way that a reproduction can have an emotional impact. Lichtenstein’s simplification is a powerful visual shorthand for a very complicated, emotional state. It’s hard not to think of Warhol when looking at his work, they both play with the idea of mass production and how images circulate, but with very different results. It reminds you that art is about ideas, and those ideas are always in dialogue with what came before.