“I’m interested in glorifying something that we in the world would say doesn’t deserve being glorified. Something that’s forgotten, focused on as though it were some sort of sacred object.”
– Ed Ruscha, born in 1937
Ed Ruscha- Venice, California Studio
1995 Photo: Leon Holob
“The rational mind constantly wants to be in charge,” he once said. “The other parts want to fly. My painting is the encounter between the mind’s necessity for control and its yearning to fly, to be free from our ever-confining skull.”
“I’ve been student of Buddhism since 1960. And of course it interfaces how I behave, how I think, how I perceive.”
“This group of artists that hung out at Ferus Gallery, we all had an arrogance that we were the best, and all of the other artists in this town were on an old boat, and they had better get on a fast plane with us. We outshone them all; we out grew them all.”
“I don’t paint for myself. I’m against the idea of expressing myself, being creative, that’s another word I really hate. I paint for you all. What I do is for these paintings to be seen, and they are like metaphors of life. I feel that a real person that does this taps into his existence.”
“My thought is that the artist functions in a tribal context, that he is the shaman. When the urban life came in, tribes no longer existed … but there was still a genetic core of shamans, of magic men, broken loose and genetically floating around. And when they had this gene, they shook the rattles. The shamans were the interpreters of the unknown, they reacted to the unknown with symbols and objects and wall painting. And that’s where it all came from. That’s where I came from, but when you’re a young man you don’t know that.”
excerpted from:
9 Things Ed Moses Would Want Us to Know for His 90th Birthday
In a career that spanned seven decades, Moses received national and international recognition for his practice known for its restless intensity and ever-evolving style. Considered one of Los Angeles’s most innovative painters and a central figure in the city’s art scene, Moses often referred to himself as a “mutator,” driven less by the desire for self-expression than by an insatiable curiosity to explore and discover.
Ed Moses had his first major exhibition in 1958 at the Ferus Gallery in Hollywood, where he became a member of the gallery’s post-World War II Cool School, a group of artists which put Los Angeles on the artistic map both for their outsized talents and personalities. Other members included Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Edward Kienholz, Larry Bell, John Altoon and Wallace Berman.
Over the next 60 years, Moses would work tirelessly, transitioning from one style to another.
Early in his career, he gained attention for his “Rose Drawings,” the result of tracing rose patterns he found on an oilcloth from Tijuana, Mexico, and repeating them until they created dense abstract fields that spread out seemingly endlessly.
In 2016, the year he turned 90, he debuted a series of craquelure paintings that he created by placing black or white paint on a canvas, adding what he called a “secret sauce,” letting it dry and then hitting the canvas with his fist or elbow.
“I’d read about Los Angeles and this fact stuck in my mind: that the city gained 1,000 new people every day. In 1956! A thousand people every day! I felt: ‘I want to be part of that.”
– Ed Ruscha, born in 1937
Ed Ruscha- Venice, California Studio- 2003
Ed Ruscha- Venice, California Studio- 1995
Photo: Leon Holob
“There’s room for saying things in bright shiny colors.”
“Good art should elicit a response of ‘Huh? Wow!’ as opposed to ‘Wow! Huh?'”
“I was raised with the Bible Belt mentality, and by coming to California, I came out of this dark place and unlearned a lot of things I’d been taught.”
“I knew I wanted to be some kind of artist from about 12. I met a neighbor who drew cartoons, and I had an idea I wanted to be a cartoonist – or something that involved Indian ink, at any rate.”
“I’d read about Los Angeles and this fact stuck in my mind: that the city gained 1,000 new people every day. In 1956! A thousand people every day! I felt: ‘I want to be part of that.”
“I’m interested in glorifying something that we in the world would say doesn’t deserve being glorified. Something that’s forgotten, focused on as though it were some sort of sacred object.”
The artist Ed Ruscha at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea: “I love books, the physical objects of them.”
Ed Ruscha Exhibitions: WORD BY WORD, 29 Jun – 5 Sep 2015
Ed Ruscha, A Particular Kind of Heaven (1983),
Oil on canvas, 90 × 136 1/2 in
d
LOS ANGELES VACANT LOTS
SHOULDA WOULDA COULDA
2008
b-ray bloggin' 
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