How Do You Do?

“How do you do?” Dripping with the signature laconic irony developed in his acclaimed career, Ed Ruscha’s formal, somewhat archaic greeting is proclaimed in his titular painting. An exceptional, grand work emerging from the artist’s famed series of mountain paintings, How Do You Do? demonstrates Ruscha’s endless stream of creativity. The mountain motif has become central to the artist’s later reputation, with the productive period centered around the turn of the millennium which he spent making the series inaugurated as the “Paean to the Peak” by art historian Thomas Crow (T. Crowe, “Fact Ribbons: Poetic Lines in the Recent Art of Ed Ruscha,” in Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Six, 1998-2003, ed. R. Dean, New York, 2013, p. 5). Capturing the immense scale and grandeur of the snow-clad crags of a high peak, How Do You Do? is painstakingly rendered, with the complex facets of each ridgeline, mountain face, rockfall, and summit depicted in minute detail against a sky of deep, saturated blues. Appropriating the imagery from photographs and illustrations, Ruscha describes the works as “ideas of ideas of ideas of mountains,” providing stage settings for his theater of words (E. Ruscha, quoted in R. Dean, “Preface,” op. cit., p. 1). The present work is one of the more spectacular of these painted stages, with Ruscha’s iconic imagery ascending up the mountain peak, diminishing in scale as if receding into the atmosphere. The work’s dynamic text is rare among the series, where Ruscha typically presents his words across a conventional horizontal plane. Ruscha’s innovation here allows text to interact with setting, emphasizing the stage-like aspect of the series.

Discussing his mountain paintings with Kerry Brougher, Ruscha noted: “You know, I was reading Melville’s Moby-Dick, and I came across something where he says that mountains are egotistical. And it struck me as a little shard of truth, that mountains do have this way of looking egotistical. Anyways, the specifics of the mountains, and whatever they mean, are beside the point, because they are really notions of mountains rather than real mountains” (E. Ruscha, quoted in K. Brougher, “Living in Hollywood Backwards: A Conversation with Ed Ruscha,” in Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, ed. K. Breuer, exh. cat., Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, 2016, p. 44). Taking Captain Ahab’s comment that “there’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things” as a point of departure, Ruscha utilizes his imposing subject as a backdrop to his linguistic wordplay (H. Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, London, 1922, p. 190).

Ruscha achieves his bold lettering in How Do You Do? with his signature reverse-stenciling technique. Each letter, in his own Boy Scout Utility Western typeface, was made by carefully laying a stencil onto the white gesso ground before painting the composition. Ruscha’s final creative act after completing the painting was removing the stencils in one rapid, irreversible, subtractive process. With this process, Ruscha accomplishes an elegant result emphasizing the duality between text and background image. Ruscha compresses each word as his text proceeds across the canvas, ending with a subtle question mark. As if a statement fading with distance, his words seem to appear to ascend the mountain face, losing audibility with every gain in altitude. Working in tandem, text and image operate to emphasize the almost incomprehensible scale of this mountaintop.

How Do You Do? expands beyond literary territory in its intricate relationship vis-à-vis text and background. The mountain, as a painted image of an image, recalls the painted cinematic backdrops of classical Hollywood productions, creating a space situated between reality and illusion. Speaking to Bill Berkson in 1988, the artist anticipated his mountain paintings, stating how, “If I’m influenced by movies, it’s from way underneath, not just the surface. A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words. In a way they’re words in front of the old Paramount mountain... they’re just meant to support the drama, like the Hollywood sign being held up by sticks” (E. Ruscha, quoted in T. Crow, op. cit., p. 5). In the present work, however, the interaction is more complex, as the text does interact with its background, rescaling each word as it summits the peak.

Ruscha asserts that the mountain motif emerged from him “wanting to have a background and a foreground,” and this background draws specifically upon the distinctive atmosphere of the West (E. Ruscha, quoted in K. Brougher, op. cit., p. 42). Just as Ruscha’s earlier landscape paintings of sunsets and his photographs of Los Angeles capture the specificity of the West Coast, his mountains articulate a specific western attitude which the artist experienced weekly, on his drives from the city to his rural retreat near Joshua Tree National Park. Most weekends, Ruscha would drive across the Mojave desert, experiencing the sublime sight of the Transverse Ranges towering over either side of the road.