A Quote by Edward Ruscha

The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing. — © Edward Ruscha
The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.
Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.
And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.
The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists.
Growing up, my mom was a painter, my best friend was a painter, my husband is a painter. For a long time I knew artists, and I didn't know any writers.
Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter's or sculptor's work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God's spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts.
I don't know that there were any rules for documentary photography. As a matter of fact, I don't think the term was even very precise. So as far as I'm concerned, the kind of photography I did in the FSA was the kind of photography I still do today, because it is based on passionate concern for the human condition. That is the basis of all the work that I do.
The student's ambition should be to become a painter's painter, rather than a popular painter. The approbation of fellow artists based on sympathy and understanding is manifestly better than the fickle or fast homage of the greater public.
The artists always reflect the times, so there's a lot to think about, a lot of unknowns, a lot of things that are describable. This is the closest I've seen to the kind of ambience that made the '60s happen. It's not about the artist having a responsibility to do anything. They have to be artists and express themselves and everything will work out fine.
The only thing the Pop Artists had in common is that we all had been commercial artists in some manner. Lichtenstein was a draftsman; I was a billboard painter, but we didn't work together. I didn't meet Andy Warhol until 1964.
My work is my language and I don't discuss it very easily. It's difficult for me to verbalize my feelings, or to intellectualize my work. In fact, it used to annoy me when Ansel Adams and Paul Strand yak-yak-yakked about what photography meant, and I told them so.
It's not about mainstream global domination. I make clothes that I can't find. I made a few pieces and Lupe Fiasco bought a pair of trousers I'd made, and a few other artists picked some up.
As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.
Outstanding past work in photography, and in fact in all the arts, is very important to today's photographers. But it should be used for inspiration and not for imitation. These works should be something to be built upon, not to be repeated.
A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.
Not every painter has a gift for painting, in fact, many painters are disappointed when they meet with difficulties in art. Painting done under pressure by artists without the necessary talent can only give rise to formlessness, as painting is a profession that requires peace of mind. The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting.
Fine-art photography is a very small world associated with galleries, museums, and university art programs. It's not like rock music; the products of this world have never been widely seen because the artists are often exploring things that are not already coded in general consciousness. It's not that photographers don't want to be famous, it's just that very few of the views from the edges of culture make the mainstream. Ansel Adams was an exception.
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