This is a new painting titled Better Living Through Windows. It is 16 feet long and its graphic forms come from a TrueType font called Marlett that was used from 1995 until recently by Microsoft to create user-interface icons. It’s part of a series of paintings I’ve been doing over the past three years revisiting the work of Roy Lichtenstein, mostly focusing on his late 1960s and early 1970s work. Pop art was long dead by then, and Lichtenstein spent a decade painting images that were intentionally minimalist, such as mirrors and sunsets. This was maybe his way of coping through a complex decade rife with academic wars and enveloped in waves of theory. I see many similarities between then and now—but mostly the utter absence of a dominant “ism”—as well as a sense of everything and nothing all happening at the same time. So my new paintings evoke 1970s Lichtenstein yet are built from code systems such as printing registration technologies, luggage-tag bar codes, and new fonts built for new systems, such as software coding. The works are a way of mirroring a seemingly evanescent present with a distinct patch of art history that shares much in common with the current moment.
Better Living Through Windows relates most to a 1965 painting called Modern Painting with Clef that I used to draw and redraw obsessively on my high school binder covers. I was maybe 13 or 14, so the painting was then not even a decade old—but I like that it offered a historical double whammy of both Pop art and Streamline Moderne works by Walter Dorwin Teague and Donald Deskey. And now, with this work, a tradition moves forward with another layer.
A version of this article appears in the June 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
