and I started learning and being interested in typography and I kind of built up this desire to make some books.” 6 “I worked for him for maybe six months or so. 5 The Markses briefly hired Ruscha in 1958 and taught him typesetting for letterpress and the basics of book construction, fortifying the young artist’s growing knowledge of classical page design. And that’s always kinda stayed with me.” 4Ĭoleman told Ruscha about Los Angeles printers that were producing fine-art books, including Plantin Press, a small private printer and publisher owned by Saul and Lillian Marks that had been founded in 1931. And I sort of got awakened by book design, and the history of book design. We did field trips to places like the Clark Library downtown. And he right off started going into the history of books in book design. And I fell into a class which was actually advertising design by a guy named Bud Coleman. “You could wear rags to school and get away with it and still have a good time. or bring bongo drums to school,” 3 but only a few miles away, at the definitively West Coast countercultural Chouinard Art Institute, such attire was not only allowed, it was practically encouraged. At Art Center, “you couldn’t have facial hair-no moustaches, no beards-short pants. ![]() In 1956, Art Center was a clean-cut, white-collar “straight” school best known for its automotive, advertising, and industrial-design departments and still teeming with students on the GI Bill. Those early years of Ruscha’s education and his initial projects-artistic, commercial, and personal-presented signposts pointing toward the artist’s future work.Įd Ruscha’s contribution to Orb 2, no. So, I went to Chouinard and started to go to school there. I got out here and found out I couldn’t get in, you know, there’s no opening. In the Saturday Evening Post, there was a story about Art Center School which my dad read, so he encouraged me to go to that school for that reason. In Ruscha’s telling,Īs I came out to California, I knew that I had to have some of my artwork, so I packed up a portfolio and I tried to get into Art Center because that was commercial art to me, and that was the thing I wanted to be. ![]() ![]() In turn, the booming growth of the middle and upper classes had the capacity to sustain-albeit marginally-art galleries, which afforded scrappy young artists opportunities and odd jobs to make ends meet. Los Angeles offered the possibility of an education in graphic design and new adventures in a city experiencing a rapid evolution in the advertising, film, television, and technology sectors. © Ed Ruscha.īut Ruscha’s drive straight out of high school was born of neither wanderlust nor economic anxiety rather, it was spurred by a desire for new prospects beyond the limitations of Oklahoma City. The trail from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles via Route 66 holds a mythic place within the lore of the American West, from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road-typed in 1951 and published in September 1957, a full year after Ruscha and Williams’s journey-to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which the author framed the trip from Oklahoma to California as one driven by drought and depression.
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