Here's the project outline:
WHERE: A show at the Orbital Gallery, Leicester Square, London
WHEN: May 16th-31st, - a week pre and post the end of the Tate's Lichtenstein show, with a possibility of extending it for another week after.
HIGH CONCEPT: Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein currently has a show on at the Tate. While the public is intimately familiar with his work, what they may be unaware of is how closely many of his images were "appropriated" from comic artists like Irv Novick, Russ Heath, Jack Kirby, John Romita and Joe Kubert, who received no fee or credit.
Is this an act of brilliant recontexturalisation? The elevation of commercial "low" art to "high" art? Art world snobbery? Artistic licence? Cultural annexation? Gallery shortsightedness? Or something else?
This show is a chance for real comic-book artists (and other "commercial artists" - illustrators, designers etc) to ask these kinds of questions and share their views, via their work.
THE PLAN:Every interested comic artist should "re-reappropriate" one of the comic images Lichtenstein used, and rework it, using some of their 'commercial art' drawing skills, to warp and twist it into something interesting and original, and in the process to comment on this type of appropriation.
The IMPORTANT thing to stress is that you'd be going back to the source material and re-reappropriating Coletta, Novick, Kirby et al - NOT copying Lichtenstein
Here's a great collection of comic panels which were copied by Lichtenstein.
Well, I chose to do a variation of the title page of "Run for Love", from Secret Hearts No. 83, by Tony Abruzzo. It was the model for Roy Lichtenstein's painting "Drowning Girl".
Here's the original page....
... and this is my take on it.
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