“I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body then coming back and becoming a word again.”

– Ed Ruscha, 1998

For over fifty years, Ed Ruscha has gleaned his artistic materials from the words and phrases that surround him. His longtime home of Los Angeles has supplied him with endless verbal resources, from billboards to talk radio. Ruscha explains that “some [words] are found ready-made, some are dreams, some come from newspapers….I don’t stand in front of a blank canvas waiting for inspiration.” (R. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, New York, 2003, p. 160) Ruscha frees words from their anchors and sets them adrift. As Ruscha states, “I began to see books and book design, typo­graphy, as a real inspiration. So I got a job with a book printer. He taught me how to set type, and then I started to see the beauty of typography and letter-forms.” (Edward Ruscha in conversation with Martin Gayford, The Telegraph, September 2009) His training in graphic design is evident in his strategic placement of the words on the canvas as well as his choice of color, font and backdrop. Through these moves, Ruscha’s words are imparted with meanings, often holding multiple connotations simultaneously. In the present work, the phrase “Angry People” is written in small black lettering and the spacing of the letters is reminiscent of the all too familiar eye charts presented to a patient at the optometrist’s office. The mint green color seen at the lower quadrant of the canvas darkens as the words seem to drift back into space, much the way the credits roll off the screen at the end of a film, lending the work a cinematic finale.

Viewers will have conventional associations with aspects of the work—its font, the color green, the word “angry”—and Ruscha is compelling the viewer to reconsider all of his preconceived notions. In Rushcha’s words, “I love the language, words have temperatures…when they reach a certain point and become hot words they appeal to me.” (O. Bergrruen, The Drawn Word, Florida, 2003, n.p.)