Join us for this year\u2019s annual Woman\u2019s Board lecture and hear from acclaimed artist Ed Ruscha, as he speaks about his prolific career and practice that spans drawing, painting, photography, film, printmaking, and publishing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
JEFFREY BROWN: This attraction of yours to the road, to what\u2019s along the roadside \u2014 it began in your youth, I guess? Tell me, where did it come from?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ED RUSCHA: I traveled around a bit with my family on driving trips of the western U.S., and maybe that \u2014 these long drives, mostly on US 66 and other roads, too \u2014 maybe inspired me to see the country. And some of them were long, even boring journeys that opened me to\u2013 I don\u2019t know, new vistas or something that I didn\u2019t have while I was growing up in Oklahoma City.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JEFFREY BROWN: And how did it become a theme of your art? Was it an overt thing that you decided to pursue as a kind of content for you as an artist or just developed naturally? How did that happen?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ED RUSCHA: Well I never sat down, planned anything out. There was no strategy, no agenda or anything. They seemed to be individual attractions I had for things like gasoline stations and, oh, like telephone poles and almost things that are overlooked or forgotten. And these things impress me in their own simple ways, I guess. The architecture of America, and especially the west, had an effect, and I began to focus, sort of piece by piece, of these individual things in my art, and somehow they began to add up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JEFFREY BROWN: What did they add up to?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ED RUSCHA: Well, they added up to really nothing more than what this whole venture is, which is an unfinished journey. You know, it\u2019s like I\u2019m trying to follow perspective and maybe I\u2019m searching for the vanishing point \u2014 that I hope I never reach!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JEFFREY BROWN: I\u2019m looking at the catalog now, so I have it open to one of the very iconic paintings of yours, the Standard Oil Station in Amarillo Texas, 1963. So just to use that as an example: describe it for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ED RUSCHA: It\u2019s like a box with words on it. And that, to me, is what most of this architecture that attracted me. On the highway and in these little towns, I would see boxes with words on them, and it began to creep into my aesthetic. And also there are, like, other elements to it that I was always impressed with. Those old movies that had passenger trains, where they would start in on one little tiny point in the very right hand corner of the screen and they would zoom into place to the upper left hand corner, and the passenger train seemed to\u2013 it was a like a bridge picture that would show the characters in the movie, you know, traveling. And that zoom factor, to me, had a place in making a picture. And I guess I was putting two and two together, that maybe it\u2019s that element of a passenger train zooming into focus. And I began to see these gas stations as maybe doing the same thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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