Art Criticism with Antonio D


Some time ago at the recycling center I found a bunch of student artwork & notebooks in the magazines/junk mail bin. It was at the end of the school year and I imagine the teacher dropped off the papers that students failed to pick up. The one I kept (after reading through them all) is a notebook by Antonio D. I would guess he's a junior high student.

The notebook has drawings & thoughts on a number of significant 20th century artworks. I enjoyed going through the notebook and thought y'all might too.


The first is Roy Lichtenstein's "Look Mickey" from 1961. I read that his young son showed him a Donald Duck comic book and asked if he could paint something as pretty as the comic.






Unlike many of Antonio's other entries, he has no comment other than a sketch of the painting. I don't think Antonio has ever gone fishing because he didn't do a good job with the fishing poles. Interestingly, his reaction to the painting closely mirrors interpretations of Lichtenstein's work. The website for the National Gallery of Art (where the painting is located) has a page on the painting and says:

At the time the simplistic narratives and boldly graphic visual mannerisms of comics and advertising were understood to resist the powerful postwar legacy of abstract expressionist painting—the highly subjective processes and grand claims for psychic content that characterized the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and other New York School artists whose achievement had recently placed American art at the center of a world stage.