Roy Lichtenstein Brushstroke Figures Series Prints For Sale

Brushstroke Figures marked Roy Lichtenstein's first print project with Graphicstudio, the Tampa-based workshop he began working with in February 1987, and the eight prints trace back to paintings begun earlier in the decade alongside a related sculpture, Brushstroke Head IV. The brushstroke itself as a subject went back much further in Lichtenstein's career, originating in a 1965 painting modelled directly on a comic panel from Strange Suspense Stories #72, and by the time he returned to the motif in this later series, gesture had become fully embedded in his personal vocabulary rather than a single one-off joke about Abstract Expressionism.

Every image in Brushstroke Figures began as a hand-assembled collage in Lichtenstein's New York studio before being translated into print, combining diagonal strokes, Ben-Day dots, hard-edged cartoon lines and looser brushwork into faces and figures built entirely from the vocabulary of gesture itself. One print, The Mask, uses half-closed eyes borrowed from Greek comedy and tragedy masks alongside a swooping cheek line, features that surface and dissolve back into pattern depending on how closely you look. Getting that effect to hold up in print took real technical invention: Don Saff at Graphicstudio had developed a wax-based printing process called waxtype, and approached Lichtenstein specifically to use it in this project, combining it with screenprint, lithography, woodcut and collage to build surfaces with a genuinely glossy, tactile finish unlike anything in Lichtenstein's earlier print work.

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