Sunrise 1965

Roy Lichtenstein's "Sunrise" is a painting made with oil and magna on canvas, and is full of bursting lines and halftone dots. I love to imagine Lichtenstein in his studio, probably surrounded by stacks of comic books, thinking, how can I take this everyday image of a sunrise and blow it up? The thick black lines create a stylized, graphic feel, while the vibrant yellow, red, and blue give it a playful, almost cartoonish energy. I can almost see him, carefully applying each dot, mimicking the printing process, and at the same time making it his own. It’s interesting how Lichtenstein, like other pop artists, was in conversation with the Abstract Expressionists, who were all about gesture and emotion. Lichtenstein takes something seemingly impersonal like commercial printing and manages to inject his unique vision, making something that’s both familiar and totally new. It reminds us that artists are always riffing off each other, creating new languages from existing vocabularies, so maybe Lichtenstein is the sunrise of a new way of seeing.