CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/5/2016

Ed Ruscha: Ribbon Words

Ed Ruscha's 1979 gunpowder and pastel drawing, "Hollywood" (1979), is reproduced from Ribbon Words, a new release this week. "I had, for some reason, a little box of gunpowder, and, I mean, I knew that this was made with charcoal and sulfur and salt, and so I jut thought, well, charcoal, I'm going to try this. And it was in little pellets, so I tried soaking it in water, and it dissolved the salts out, but it left a charcoal that had a kind of a warm tone to it, and it could be used in a way that was very easy to correct when you wanted to—if you made a mistake you could correct it much easier than you could if you used graphite. And so it became a convenient material that I liked. It had a good surface to it. So pictorially, I liked working with it."