Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, November 20, 2023: Ed Ruscha, an American artist

Ed Ruscha (1937) is an American artist whose oeuvre combines aspects of the language and iconography of Pop Art with deft Conceptual execution. With a practice that spans drawing, painting, photography, film, printmaking, and publishing, Ruscha’s background as a graphic designer is evident in his exceptional eye for typography and layout. He is perhaps best known for his artist’s books, such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963)—a pictorial study of the fuel stations he encountered on a trip along Route 66. Born Edward Joseph Ruscha IV on December 16, 1937 in Omaha, NE, he moved to Los Angeles to study at what is now the California Institute of the Arts. California might arguably have had the biggest influence on Ruscha, as he has incorporated its sights and state of mind into his singular visual commentary on modern American life. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

For over 50 years, Ed Ruscha has delivered wryly detached portraits of the ephemera of our lives, found deeply embedded within various subcultures, most notably that of Southern California. Through his lens, familiar imagery such as specific architectural gems, common motifs within consumer culture, or font-specific words elevated as objects are bestowed an iconic status. His fodder is often garnered from the environments in which he lives and works, pulling in a mixed bag of visuals from the film and advertising industries as well as a thriving vortex of trends and memes stemming from an area often noted for being the birthplace of "cool." Ed Ruscha is the quintessential Los Angeles artist whose work catapulted Pop art from a form that merely highlighted the universal ordinary into a form in which the ordinary could now be viewed in relation to its geographically intrinsic cultural contexts. In his hands Pop becomes personal.

Rather than simply painting a word, Ruscha considered the particular font that might add an elevated emotion to the meaning much like the way a poet considers a phrase. By painting a word as a visual, he felt he was marking it as official, glorifying it as an object rather than a mere piece of text.

Ruscha's skewing of everyday objects with a twist spurs the viewer to look at something ordinary in a new light. This can be seen in his trompe l'oeil word paintings in which oil paint resembles common viscous fluids or, with a touch of humor, in his paintings of LACMA and Norm's - two Los Angeles institutions, both of which he depicts licked with flames.

The ever-present influence of Hollywood and media machines can be seen in the way Ruscha paints his solitary subjects upon the overall space of the canvas plane. Bold, large words or images floating on vast singular backgrounds mimic the opening screens of movies or fleeting glimpses of roadside billboards that must catch an audience's attention in one compelling instant.

Ruscha's homage to the ordinary monuments of our lives, seen all around us but typically relegated to background noise, extends beyond the canvas. As seen with his book Twenty Six Gasoline Stations and others, he offers a deadpan look at the common and humble elements that float on our periphery, presented as a form of simple documentation rather than pristine art subject. This furthers the idea of Pop art as a vehicle for pulling out the mundane from its obscurity within our collective consciousness.

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