Ruscha, Ed

Biography

Words and phrases play a central role in Ed Ruscha's artworks. Born and raised in the Midwest, Ruscha moved to Los Angeles in 1956 with the intention of becoming a commercial artist. He enrolled at Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts) in Valencia, which was then known as a training ground for Disney illustrators and animators.

The careful planning and precision involved in commercial art provided Ruscha with the means to extend the boundaries of painting. Pulling elements from the visual language of advertising, he has made hundreds of prints, drawings, and paintings that feature bold letters on abstract, atmospheric backgrounds. His vernacular images of Standard Oil gas stations and other commercial logos brought him to prominence as a leader of West Coast Pop art in the 1960s.

Ruscha frequently experiments with unorthodox artistic materials, including gunpowder, tobacco, axel grease, and blood. He has also created photographic series that, like 1966's Every Building on the Sunset Strip, are determined by system rather than subjective decisions.

Ruscha explains how road signs influenced his painting

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SFX: guitar twang — the sounds of driving on the highway; cars rushing by

ED RUSCHA:

In the early sixties, I would drive between Oklahoma and California. And I loved being on the road and the kind of lost in thought idea that — that hits you when you travel along the road and see signs. Signs have always been an important thing to me, and they begin showing up in my work.

NARRATOR:

After a few of those cross-country road trips, Ed Ruscha settled into a job at a printing press in Los Angeles.

SFX: the sounds of a typesetter’s studio — the clatter of letter plates and the whir of the press.

RUSCHA:

Setting type and working with typography, I began to see these things as pictures. I liked monosyllabic words that had a certain power to them.

And then the world of painting came into this thing, and — bang — they started melding together, and I could see that I should paint a picture of that word, rather than print it on paper.

NARRATOR:

Put yourself back on that highway …

RUSCHA echo:

You travel along the road and see signs

NARRATOR:

And imagine this word on a sign coming towards you.

SFX: highway sounds and music return.

NARRATOR:

As the sign blurs past, can you see the letters just as shapes, separate from the word? Tricky, isn’t it?

SFX: music out.