Roy Lichtenstein

When I was going to school and under the influence of Abstract Expressionism, I believed that if you had a give-and-take rapport with your work that it would be you, and that would be all that was required. It would be honest, and the core of your personality would come out if you responded to position and contrasts in your work.

Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.

I don't think that I'm over his influence but they probably don't look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.

I think there's the apparent lack of subtlety and sort of make-believe anti-sensibility connected with American art. I think this is a style, and it does relate to our culture, and I think it would be anachronistic maybe to pretend to be involved with subtle changes and modulations and things like that, because it's really not part of America.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

I'm trying to make paintings like giant musical chords, with a polyphony of colours that is nuts but works.

I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.

I drew as a child, they tell me. I can vaguely remember doing it. And then I drew again in the late years at high school.

I don't know why you'd want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I'm always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We're both saying something we want to be true.

Yeah, you know, you like it to come on like gangbusters, but you get into passages that are very interesting and subtle, and sometimes your original intent changes quite a bit.

But usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes.

When I have used cartoon images, I've used them ironically to raise the question, 'Why would anyone want to do this with modern painting?'