The renowned artist Ed Ruscha was born in Nebraska, and worked in Southern California since the late 1950s. The everyday landscapes of the West, are the primary motifs of his often deadpan and instantly recognizable paintings and works on paper. This book offers a full exploration of the painter's fascination with the evolving American West.
The renowned artist Ed Ruscha was born in Nebraska, grew up in Oklahoma, and has lived and worked in Southern California since the late 1950s. Beginning in 1956, road trips across the American Southwest furnished a conceptual trove of themes and motifs that he mined throughout his career. The everyday landscapes of the West, especially as experienced from the automobile--gas stations, billboards, building facades, parking lots, and long stretches of roadway--are the primary motifs of his often deadpan and instantly recognizable paintings and works on paper, as well as his influential artist books such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations and All the Buildings on the Sunset Strip. His iconic word images--declaring Adios, Rodeo, Wheels over Indian Trails, and Honey . . . I Twisted through More Damn Traffic to Get Here--further underscore a contemporary Western sensibility. Ruscha's interest in what the real West has become--and Hollywood's version of it--plays out across his oeuvre.
"Viewing the west through Ruscha’s eyes offers planners to think about the opposite of roadside America: the vibrancy of center cities so often dismissed as “crowds;” the pedestrian environments so ripe for redesign; the public spaces that we forgot to build as we expanded; and, most of all, the zoning laws, street patterns, and real estate typologies that pretend as if we can expand infinitely, all the way to that long horizon."
