Roads Collar (C.228) pushed the Brushstroke Figures Series closest to pure abstraction — the human form present somewhere in the sweeping red, orange, teal, and brown marks, but so nearly consumed by their energy that the figure required effort to locate. The bold curved strokes that ran down the right side of the picture were barely distinguishable from the Brushstroke paintings of 1965–1966, the figural reading dependent on a dot-field passage at the left and a cluster of smaller marks suggesting a face — elements that kept the work on the representational side of a line it was clearly interested in crossing.

Abstract Expressionism had used the gestural mark to escape the figure entirely — the body's energy transferred into paint, the resulting surface carrying that energy without depicting anything. Lichtenstein spent his career examining what that claim actually looked like when scrutinised, and the Brushstroke Figures were the most direct version of that inquiry: the marks that had been used to transcend representation now conscripted back into it, building faces and bodies from the same strokes that de Kooning and Kline had used to dissolve them. Roads Collar (C.228) was where that reversal came closest to undoing itself — the figure assembled, then nearly lost again in the energy of its own making.

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