Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha's artistic training was rooted in commercial art and his interest in words and typography ultimately provided the primary subject of his paintings, prints and photographs. Since 1964, Ruscha has been experimenting regularly with painting and drawing words and phrases, often oddly comic and satirical sayings alluding to popular culture and life in LA. In the 1970s, Ruscha began using entire phrases in their works, thereby making it a distinctive characteristic of the post-Pop Art generation. During the mid-1970s, he made a series of drawings in pastel using pithy phrases against a field of color and from 1980, Ruscha started using an all-caps typeface of his own invention named ”Boy Scout Utility Modern” in which curved letter forms are squared-off.