Ruscha’s photographs of gas stations are what led to his artistic career to race off. He found the simplicity and everydayness of these gas stations to be really charming and appealing, which led to his gas station photobook being pretty successful. Later in his career, he began to slowly stray away from painting and drawing buildings and started to get more into word art. Initially, most of his art when starting this concept change was very simple and was essentially words on a colored background. This was consistent with Ruscha’s previous building paintings, which for the most part, lacked specific details. This was a pattern I noticed between the different topics in Ruscha’s paintings and how Ruscha as an artist would appreciate the more simple things and expresses them through his art pieces. Although there isn’t much to look at in his paintings, they were still aesthetically pleasing to audiences.
