ROY LICHTENSTEIN, SEASCAPE I, LANDSCAPES, MOONSCAPES AND SEASCAPES, SCREEN PRINT IN COLOURS ON TRANSLUCENT ROWLUX, EDITION OF 200, 1965
Roy Lichtenstein’s intricate Landscapes, Moonscapes and Seascapes span over thirty years of his career. Time and time again, the artist would return to this innovative sequence to revise the means of landscape painting. As a result, his extensive project features several autonomous portfolios and individual editions.
Seascape 1 of 1965 belongs to the New York Ten suite. Highly experimental in its application of materials, the artwork presents a fictitious and humorous waterscape. Lichtenstein cuts his white and blue dotted sky in half using an indigo horizon line. Stretched out below the vivid blue stencil lies a body of water constituted entirely out of bubble wrap. The bubbles mirror the design of the patterned sky above.
Seascape 1 precedes the simplified layout of the Ten Landscapes portfolio, reducing its pictorial plane to bare essentials. Lichtenstein transforms a naturalistic setting into something entirely artificial. The resulting scene shows a fully abstracted and static seascape at first glance.
Despite a sense of overriding flatness, however, the bubbly surface texture provokes sensory associations of motion. Lichtenstein applies plastic sheets of translucent Rowlux to ensure these spatial interplays, producing a playful simulation of movement. This print marks the starting point for Lichtenstein’s life-long artistic quest to invoke illusionistic effects using unexpected and experimental materials.
Read more about Landscapes, Moonscapes and Seascapes by Roy Lichtenstein.
ABOUT ROY LICHTENSTEIN
Born in Manhattan in 1923, Roy Lichtenstein was a leading figure in the Pop Art movement during the second half of the 20th century. His distinctive artistic style is inspired by the visual language of consumerism and advertising that pervaded American popular culture at the time, and his work recalls a society of widespread commercialism that has remained powerfully relevant to this day. Learn more about Roy Lichtenstein.
