But Is It Ground-Breaking?

My Watercolor I Re-Worked with Acrylic

Hi-
Last week I was watching a segment on a talk show about Roy Lichtenstein, and one of the points made in the show was important enough—I thought—to put it in the blog.

That is: art movements come about when artists create something that has never been done before.

Let that sink in for a minute…

Now the Lichtenstein piece was all about his work and how his son is still showing his famous art at galleries and shows. But the important thing about his work was that it was ground-breaking. Not just different, but ground-breaking.

Lichtenstein’s work was. His work was like comic strips, comic book art, and graphic arts tools, such as ben-day dots. One of the examples mentioned in the show was a piece of his art from a technical manual that was, or at least looked like, a line-drawing of a spark plug--subjects that up until then had not been thought of as art.

Lichtenstein, along with Andy Warhol, started the Pop-art movement in the early-to-mid 1960s. Lichtenstein’s comic-book characters, together with Warhol’s high-contrast photo treatments, transformed modern art of the period.

Pop-art was ground-breaking, just as Impressionism was in the 1870s, and Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists were in the 1940s.

Think something that has never been done before—that’s an art movement.

If you recall my recent blog (Watercolor AND Acrylic!), I said I was going to re-work one of my watercolor paintings with acrylic, and I did, and it’s today’s image. I went over some of the watercolor parts with acrylic to lighten up the fore- and mid-ground and brighten the sky. After that I used watercolor pencils to emphasis the flowers. (Mind you, it’s not my most favorite motif because flower paintings of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush are rather cliché, at least in this part of the world.)

Anyway, it's not ground-breaking and won’t start any art movements, of course, but using watercolor and acrylic together in a painting was different, for me anyway.

Happy Painting!

Until next blog…