Blue Face (C.226) belongs to Roy Lichtenstein's Brushstroke Figures Series, produced in 1989, in which the human figure was built entirely from the broad gestural marks he had been studying since the mid-1960s — the same brushstroke forms that had once been his subject now doing the structural work of depicting a head and shoulders, a face assembled from sweeping curves of blue and white rather than from drawn outline or described anatomy.

The Brushstroke paintings of 1965–1966 had been among his most pointed interventions in contemporary art — taking the gestural mark that Abstract Expressionism had elevated into a sign of authentic feeling and rendering it as a printed, reproducible sign, the spontaneous gesture translated into something as repeatable as a Ben-Day dot. The Brushstroke Figures carried that inquiry further by asking what happened when those marks were also the thing depicted — when the sign of gesture became the substance of a figure, when the brushstroke stopped being a subject and started being a body. Blue Face (C.226) was where that question first appeared in the series, the face looking back at the viewer from marks that were simultaneously paint and person.

The combination of lithograph, waxtype, woodcut, and screenprint gave the surface a physical complexity that reinforced the layered argument — the blue marks carrying different qualities depending on which process had deposited them, the figure built up through accumulation of technique as much as of colour.

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