'Whaam!' by Roy Lichtenstein
This audio clip describes the painting Whaam! by Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997).
It has been created for use as part of our primary school resource, The Superpower of Looking, in order to support pupils with blindness or visual impairment to take part in the lessons.
Explore the painting further in our resource, Pop Art planes inspired by comics.
Full audio description text
This work by Roy Lichtenstein, using acrylic and oil paints, was made in 1963. It’s almost two metres tall and just over four metres wide. The canvas is edged by a thin black line and divided into two square frames, or pictures, like a comic strip.
Both pictures share the same light greyish-blue background, which is actually made up of a uniform pattern of small, blue dots. Inspired by printed comic book images, Lichtenstein often used dots in this way to create shading and texture in his artworks.
In the left-hand picture, a cartoon-style fighter jet zooms away from us towards the centre line. Neatly outlined in black, the jet is white with areas of more dot-work shading. This shading appears grey when viewed from a distance, but is actually made up of tiny blue and red dots.
A transparent cockpit bulges like a bubble mid-way along the body of the plane, which is marked with a white star. This is the symbol used by American war planes at the time. In the cockpit, the pilot is wearing a white helmet and goggles and his white-gloved hands grip the controls. He is chasing another jet, which is in the second, right-hand picture, with just its back end showing.
Above the cockpit of the first plane, a yellow speech bubble contains the pilot’s words, 'I pressed the fire control…and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky'. Thin red and yellow lines and clouds of smoke shoot from beneath the wing of his plane. They cross the centreline, between the two pictures, to connect with the second plane, fracturing its tail fin and sending it off balance. Spiky rings of red, yellow and white surround the target. The word 'Whaam', followed by an exclamation mark is written in yellow capitals in the top-left corner of the image of the exploding plane, suggesting the sound made by the dramatic explosion. This gives the painting its title: Whaam!
