Artist: Roy Lichtenstein By Richard Schulman
Fictional Truths
A little story: I could never critique the art of Roy Lichtenstein. It would be too complicated and yet, it can seem uncomplicated. The artist who appeared to attach his eyeballs to a stretched canvas; that man I can talk about.
His stoic center of mind quite quietly hypnotized him. I saw the artist direct his tool what looked like a tiny slimmed down paint brush, bristles like a taut tuft of hair, was too shy to be seen. A brick or a bomb could be dropped and not an eyebrow or pore would have winced.
I made three visits to three different studios over a ten-year period. Lichtensteins’ DNA might have passed for a mime in artist clothing. I have often said that I lived in an habitat of like minded creatures. It was true. To watch an artist who by good fortune became famous, to watch this person in real time stoically creating provocative visions stupefied the mind.
Roy was merely one of hundreds in my archives. When I watched him paint, I felt both old and young, exuberant and steadfast. I paced my eyes to his studied address atop the awaiting canvas. Roy Lichtenstein was a ten out of ten.
Often I rewind my history of art in artists. I saw Roy intermingle color for his palette while the pigments awaited their calling. Primary colors shared the stage with greater values; vibrancy elevated, vibrancy toned down. Roy painted large swaths of canvases as if he was imitating graceful traceries of watercolors. As the brush approached, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, might have stood near for comparison in comparative art history. There was no imitation but the hint remains. Separated by one hundred and more years, their appearances matter to Lichtenstein. I just imagined ( as others might) the marvel of what may come next.
What I know about art is limited, but what I can see in an artists’ eyes and Gumby like movements can be behavioral science class wrapped up in a thousand portraits of diverse and diverging personalities. Then again, I know very little about a lot.
The Sweet Smell of Success: When I photograph famous or renowned personalities, certain reminders come to mind. A respected art curator once told me that there are a lot of facts and presupposed facts when you photograph a famous person. Persons of fame who may be near-you do not gossip about. One inappropriate word, one reveal of the unconscionable is simply not acceptable to capture with the camera.
In Roy Lichtenstein’s studio I remember witnessing an extremely alluring frame of bodies. I knew instantly that not even a head shake of acknowledgement was allowed. In hindsight I try to remember the moment as an apparition; I knew to do my best to erase and eclipse it from memory. Though it is impossible, I watched the unmentionable and could not even acknowledge it. I suddenly became embroiled within the Tony Curtis-Burt Lancaster bickering in “The Sweet Small of Success”. I reminded my eyes to hush my mind. My lips were sealed.
It was one of the main reasons why I had access to so many artists. What happens in the privacy between canvas and artist should remain a memorable conflict. There is a bit of reward, protecting the intimacy, out of respect for those that await the immediacy of my camera. How much do I love what I see? Those shared impressions meant the world to me. I often revisit in my mind’s eye what I know I know I saw, and what I imagined I might have seen.
My three portrait sessions with Roy Lichtenstein have left me with a collection of memories, sights and sounds. I can still hear them as I remember lying below him, watching him press on to that canvas the way an ophthalmologist tests for oxygen by the touch/press of a fiber optic needle sensor into tissue. So much is met in those meaningful caresses.
I spent a day alone in Amsterdam with Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, in New York with Picasso’s Guernica,
at Saint Petersburg’s Hermitage, with Matisse’s Dance, at the Prado with Velasquez’s Las Meninas.
I was not with those artists while they painted their majestics. I didn’t see those masterworks created. I could hardly make an apples to apples comparison to Lichtenstein in his studio. I know who my favorite artists and writers are, but my decades have never been about expounding beliefs and measuring greatness. Instead it has always been about a particular tick-tock of time that comes around once, if at all. The in person engagement lives in ten-thousand words to be said. The greatness of art in history fills passageways of thought and meditative brilliance.
Ghosts matter. To be near the matter of pigments and to approach a bit of magnificence in the massive Lichtenstein studio as ghost of a shadow alone, is quite the dream to be behold. It has never been about which artist or work is the more outstanding; we know or assume we know the answers. It is the experience of time lived in this manner. Such generosity, access, and engagement in a space is unimaginable until you are actually there.
