Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Big Painting No. 6" in English language version.
Begun in the autumn of 1965, Lichtenstein's series of Brushstroke paintings was initiated after he saw a cartoon in Charlton Comics' Strange Suspense Stories. 72 (October 1964). One scene shows an exhausted yet relieved artist who has just completed a painting. This depicts two massive brushstrokes that take up the entire surface area. The absurdity of using a small paintbrush to create an image of two monumental brushstrokes was explored in many different variations. Transforming an expressive act that was mythologized for its immediacy and primal origins into a cartoon-like, mechanically produced-lookiing image. Lichtenstein created a reflexive commentary on gestural painting.
In 1965–66 Lichtenstein painted a series of large canvases, such as Big Painting VI (1965), in which he parodied the sweeping brushstrokes made by Abstract Expressionists with house-painter's brushes. The double paradox was that of representing an apparently spontaneous mark by rendering it in graphic language as a series of painstaking operations, but making the result look so effortless and mechanical that it might all have been printed by a single touch. As immediate as their impact, legibility of image and humour as any of his comic-strip paintings, these pictures pose serious questions about the artistic process and in particular about the interaction of idea, invention and execution.
