[NARRATOR Laughing]
Oh boy! Well, these flowers are certainly “different”! Have you ever seen such a depressing bunch?
Think, for a moment, about the paintings of the beautiful blooms you may have seen before… Close your eyes for a second…
Do you remember the bright colors, and the way the flowers were perfectly arranged in their vase? Light was probably streaming through a window somewhere, wasn’t it? I bet you could see some of the brush strokes on the flower petals.
And the smell!
[NARRATOR: sniffs, as if smell flowers].
Your memory tells you they probably smelled sweet, so sweet, like rows and rows of cotton candy.
OK, open your eyes.
That’s actually the point of this work – it’s poking fun at traditional still-life paintings of pretty roses and sunflowers.
Black Flowers is an early work by Roy Lichtenstein - a very famous artist known for his color-rich pop art paintings inspired by comic book panels. And you can see his most famous technique being developed in this work.
In the background are lots of small, hand-painted spots. Those are called benday dots, and they mimic the technique used in printing newspapers. As Lichtenstein grew more famous, so did the dots in his paintings. And dots the truth!