“In Stowaway, I pushed my intrinsic interest in abstraction, in images without the baggage of images, and I pushed color and form around to create the most exciting surface I could imagine, trying to make light come out of a piece of paper.”
—James Rosenquist The Stowaway Peers out at the Speed of Light captures the idea of something that has been changed by the speed of light, building a composition that is constantly disintegrating in front of the viewer’s eyes through a collision of zoomed in, up-close images – harkening back to Rosenquist’s days as a billboard painter. “I was melting objects into an abstraction. I was getting back to my pre-pop roots.”i More organized and dimensional in the left of the composition, occupied with precisely rendered reflective objects, the print slowly descends into something more free and chaotic, waves of energy that vibrate with irregular motion and bounce between each other. And finally, the right-hand quadrant is home to more gestural, Abstract Expressionist forms.ii
To match this explosion of color and overlapping collaged forms, the title alludes to a stowaway in a high-speed spaceship daring to take a glance out the window on a treacherous, intergalactic voyage, unsure of where he is going or if he will make it.
2001 Monumental lithograph in colors, on Saunders Waterford paper, with full margins. I. 36 x 96 in. (91.4 x 243.8 cm) S. 46 x 105 3/4 in. (116.8 x 268.6 cm) Signed, titled, dated and numbered 'AP 3/12' in pencil (an artist's proof, the edition was 40), published by Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip, New York (with their blindstamp), framed.