Artist, Roy Lichtenstein: I very early tried to do paintings of brushstrokes, and they didn't look like brushstrokes. It became a kind of abstract thing, but I guess, finally, I got so I could draw one that looked like it. I like the idea of carefully drawing a drip of paint, because it's conceptualizing something spontaneous.
Narrator: That's Roy Lichtenstein. He was a Pop artist who made art using advertising and comic book imagery. His brushstroke works, however, commented on an earlier generation of artists: the Abstract Expressionists, who used spontaneous gestures to create different marks.
Artist, Roy Lichtenstein: My upbringing in art, my Abstract Expressionist upbringing, was one in which the artist had to be inventive and never put the same shape down twice. The brushstroke you made would always be different. It was always a thing of expression and difference.
When pop started in '61, one of its aspects was a kind of cleanliness, partly as a comment on society, but probably just in opposition to the art that went before. There's a kind of purification of form. The form is boiled down to a particular thing. but it still expresses you as an individual.