Ed Ruscha is an 82 year old American artist, who is associated with movements such as Pop Art. The artist works with photography, printmaking, painting and film. With a career spanning over 6 decades, he became well known in the 1950’s when he began working using newspapers or advertisements to create collages with text and imagery. Often commenting on what surrounded him, he became inspired by the city of Los Angeles, where he created urban type work, combining everyday words and phrases with the cityscape of Los Angeles. His conceptual work, combined with humour and comments on the times, gave him a direct link to the Pop Art movement, where his work has remained influential to this day.
Here, he comments on his use of text and image and how he combines the two:
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“A lot of these mountaintops, they suggest glory or beauty, things like that. They almost have their own orchestration, you can almost hear trumpets playing, and I like that reference. It’s sort of a non-verbal way of referencing something that is really not making any noise at all. But then, putting combination with words, that tension is where I live, I guess.”
This quote from Ed details the way he works within the combination of text and image, the ‘tension’ as he describes it. The ‘noise’ he discusses when creating these juxtaposed responses to what he sees. The work is often very odd, sometimes has hardly any traction or contextual meaning, sometimes simply a subjective response to Ruscha.
This short documentary, narrated by Owen Wilson, details the life and artistry of Ruscha. From beginning as an artist, to his projects around gas stations and apartments, to repetitive drawings and mark makings using food as paint, to his sketches of his photographs. His work with text and fonts became world famous, experimenting with them in any gruelling way possible. He has become somewhat of a rockstar in the art world.
His work has inspired me to look at the words I have found, around working with communication and look for more inspiring ways to place them into my images. I don’t want to keep my work apart from the words I want to use, perhaps my imagery should be worked into the background alike Ruscha’s work, bringing the images to the forefront of my work? Or perhaps the element of collage will be brought into my work, adding playfulness and experimentation. This will perhaps bring new meaning to them, allowing for exploration.
Emily Ryder 