Stephen Andrews (artist) to his own experience of living with HIV. Andrews’ method of homemade colour separation evokes both the 19th-century painting technique of Pointillism: “in which small, distinct dots of pure color are applied in patterns to form an image”, and the Ben-Day dots of mechanical printing. Beyond these references, Andrews’ uses the technique to, at the same time, evoke the alchemy of vision and break its mechanics down. As a result, Andrews creates works that “hover at legibility.” “The pixilation or dot matrix completely obscures details, making specifics impossible to see. We can't grasp the full picture.“ The series of rubbed-crayon
Big Painting No. 6 is in part a satirical response to the gestural painting of Abstract Expressionism. Like most of Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots works it is a depiction of mechanical reproduction via painterly technique. In this case, the satire comes from the depiction of the graphical depiction of the spontaneous painting motion in painstaking painterly detail. In early 1970, Andy Warhol established the record auction price for a painting by a living American artist with a $60,000 (US$ in dollars) sale of "Big Campbell's Soup Can with Torn Label (Vegetable Beef)" (1962), which is part of the "Campbell's Soup Cans" series, in a sale