“Exclamation Appointment”, Contemporary Modern Series, No. 66

Back when I was a child in Georgia, my school had taken me to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. This was the place where I felt the most comfortable with my often eccentric thoughts and ideas. Armed with a walkman, I would peruse room by room, listening to music, and lose myself in the vaulted white walls that carried frames of contemporary art for me to contemplate. Art, back then, did not register as a thing to understand historically, but rather they were elements of introspection for my child self. Each canvas was like a mirror that showed me what I was really supposed to see. Each canvas was a sounding board for my infantile emotions.

I never registered much beyond that until I turned that fateful corner one day, and my eyes car wrecked into a Roy Lichtenstein painting. I saw this woman, splattered with dots, crying over her lover. My eyes could not take in what I was seeing and I felt my heart disconnect, reconfigure itself, and jumpstart my body into a million chills. This was the first time that art and I connected beyond the self.

My teacher eventually found me 45 minutes later, still staring at this piece.

“There are so many other rooms for you to see” she said.

“Yes but I can’t stop looking at this painting. I like this one the best”

25 years later, I still remember that moment when I connected with Roy Lichtenstein’s work. He was, and is, my greatest influence for my own body of work. His subjects, his precision, and his entire collection is paramount to anything I have ever seen. It was no surprise that he was the leading artist in the new art movement, and furthermore it was no surprise that he was my leading inspiration to paint.

This piece is called “Exclamation Appointment”, and is a tribute to Roy Lichtenstein’s work. This however was not formatted with Lichtenstein’s classic ben day dot approach. Instead I made 2,712 squares to the get the center point of 678 circles, and drafted them by hand. After much work, I removed 1/2 of the circles, and painted the background with Roy’s classic blue (Cerulean PG7x1/PB36x4/PW6x1). Because this piece took a lot of time, I carried this with me across the United States while traveling for work. This was painted in

Denver, Colorado
Anaheim, California
Philadelphia, Pennslyvania
Washington, D.C.
Brooklyn, New York
New York City, New York
Los Angeles, California

This marks as the 9th in the Contemporary Modern series, and 75th of the TENxTENxTEN collection.