Pop! goes the easel

"I had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger 

in an evil vehicle cruising through Paradise."

-- Sam Shepard, Cruising Paradise

"In the Car" self portrait 9-28-13

"You call this a chariot?"

-- Missy Lyons, Alien Promise

"I don't mean this, but I'm going to say it anyway. 

I don't really think of pop art and serious art as being that far apart."

-- Twyla Tharp

My computer and my printer have been behaving badly, causing me undue frustration and rage.

So I am giving them a time out.

"In the Car," by Roy Lichtenstein, 1963

Instead of digital imagery, today I decided to go old school and busted out the paper, pencils and markers.

I love pop art -- its strong graphic nature, the bold lines, the bright colors, the clean simplicity.

I am also drawn to the imagery in comic books and graphic novels, and admire the artists who can create it.

I am not one of those artists, but it was fun to try. It was definitely fun pretending for a day.

The result is my personal riff on Roy Lichtenstein's 1963 painting, "In the Car," (above) which depicts a tense, icy moment between a well-dressed man and woman driving, well, in the car. In my version, just for fun, I drew in my own face for both characters and made myself into a pop art self portrait.

As it turns out, Lichtenstein's painting is also an homage. It is one of many pieces he based on panels from the comic book series Girls' Romances, which was published during the 50s and 60s, and covered romance topics like dating and marriage. ("In the Car" is based on a panel from issue #78,1961).

So today's face is an homage to an homage.

Pop on.