Ed Ruscha (1937 - )

Ed Ruscha has always recognized the important influence of comics in his artistic education. Besides, he studied graphic arts and followed a career in that field, until a trip across Europe helped him realise his deepest desire to become a painter. In his first paintings he integrated words and borrowed subjects both from the culture of image and the world of advertising. Early on, he experimented with with all kinds of techniques, means and working tools, such as the airbrush, which makes the contours more fluid, even foggy, while achieving a subtler colour mixing. This tool is ideal for outline drawing, a term commonly used since Antiquity to describe works, the details of which have been drawn based on the projected shadow of an object.

Among the themes he is interested in is the reinterpretation of marine art, which was particularly popular between the 17^th and 19^th centuries. However, the artist does not seem concerned at all about the details of the ship or rendering the sea and the sky. Choosing to recall only the outline of the boat, he makes a spectral presence of it, both threatening and threatened, where sky and sea seem merged in a hostile, oppressive but fascinating fog. Drawing on images not from his own experience but from magazines and pictures, the painter remains faithful to the pop art thinking and explores themes being present in the collective unconscious, not aiming to approach them under a new point of view but to treat them as images with distance, irony and a touch of humour.

Homeward Bound, a diptych of monumental dimensions, is at the same time both one of the first outline drawings and one of Ruscha’s first painted seascapes. The elimination of any element recalling the stereotype of marine art and the enormous dimensions make it a quasi-abstract work, where the pop thinking is vanished in order to arouse in the spectator a desire for introspection and more reflection than a mere cliché. The exclusive use of black and white highlights this impression, referring to photography and cinema as his sources of inspiration. The vague, black silhouettes surrounded by grey, blurry tones seem seized by a camera of another age, hanged on a fluid movement. Using the airbrush, Ruscha no longer performs the painter’s familiar movements with the paintbrush. He gets closer to the photographer’s remote position, who is looking for the right moment to press the shutter release. For Ruscha, who has practiced photography a lot and directed some films, this relation between the worlds of painting, image and movement is as fruitful as enthralling.

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