Seascape II

Roy Lichtenstein’s intricate landscapes, moonscapes and seascapes works 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 II of 1965 is a screenprint and die-cut collage mounted inside a white painted wooden box with plexi front. Highly experimental in its use of materials, the artwork presents a fictitious and humorous waterscape. Stretched out at the bottom and pasted on the vivid blue backdrop lies a body of water constituted entirely out of yellow stencil. The rippled contours mirror the design of the prismatic sky, transforming 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 reflective 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. In no other adaptation of a genre was Lichtenstein as experimental with materials as he was in his landscape renditions. His quest to create optical illusions and plays on perception continued in his Mirrors and later Reflections series.