Sunrise 1965

Roy Lichtenstein made this Sunrise, and what grabs me right away is how he turns something so fleeting and full of light into a flat, almost mechanical image. He's working with a limited palette, those bold yellows and reds, and simplifying everything down to these essential shapes. Look at those Ben-Day dots, mimicking the printing process of comic books. They give a texture, a kind of visual buzz, that contrasts with the smooth, hard edges of the sun rays and clouds. It's like he's saying, "Hey, this isn't real life, it's a representation." The red sun, perfectly round and intense, is so iconic. It's a symbol stripped down to its bare essentials. Lichtenstein's playing with how we see, how we process images in a world saturated with mass media. It's a bit like Warhol's soup cans in that way, and it makes you think about what's real and what's just a copy.