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Inspiration: Ed Ruscha

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From Wikipedia:

Edward Joseph Ruscha IV (roo-SHAY; born December 16, 1937) is an American artist associated with the pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California.

I’ve been really into Ed Ruscha recently, so I thought I’d repost some of his works that I found on his website. Hopefully you can take inspiration from this stuff as I have.

I love seeing Ruscha’s process stuff, his preliminary sketches for larger/more elaborate works, so that’s most of what’s represented here. In fact, I like to see that for any artist. It’s so intriguing how much of this stuff is on random scraps of paper, and has gotten me thinking about my own process and perhaps making the surface a work lives on more part of my work as a whole, or at least giving it more consideration.

I also love Ruscha’s use of text, and how when context is removed from a word or phrase a huge amount of context is left to be assumed by the viewer, giving the words such a mysterious and weighty presence. In most of our experience seeing written words, the letterforms are these hyper-precise, usually computer generated glyphs. By contrast, the words he’s drawn are not perfect, and it makes them feel more alive somehow. And when I look at them I can’t help but imagine him drawing them, and me drawing them. I love when a work of art shows the artist’s hand.