Ruscha

The mood shifted in Ruscha's work in the mid-1980s, as his use of both color and language became more restrained. A switch from oil to acrylic paint, which he applied with an airbrush, prompted the artist to make a series of "strokeless" pictures. Restricting himself to a largely black-and-white palette, the artist portrayed subjects drawn from history and fantasy, such as ships and elephants, as hazy silhouettes. Rather than faithful representations, these motifs function like symbols. "The ship is my interpretation of a picture of a ship rather than a ship," Ruscha has said. "It's like a painting of an idea about a ship." The grayscale surfaces of these works recall early photography and cinema, which Ruscha further explored by painting film projections in painstaking detail, recreating the effect of degraded celluloid through simulated scratches and dust spots. Just as these marks interrupt the compositions, blank rectangles occasionally appear in other works from this period. Resembling redacted text, these voids both stand in for language and, as the artist has offered, "suggest a space for a thought."