Fascinated by the power of words and typography, for six decades Ed Ruscha (born 1937) has explored the idea of words as images in their own right, using his work to obscure the boundaries between advertising, graphic design and art. Ruscha first was drawn to the idea of words “as pictures” while working as a freelance sign painter and typesetter, and this love of typography and lettering has remained central to his art throughout his career.

With strategic considerations of font, hue, and compositional placement, Ruscha has made words the subject of his art, crafting phrases that are open to myriad interpretations, creating combinations that are at times enigmatic and nonsensical, or alternatively deadpan, ironic, and playful. By removing words from a linguistic context, they assume a new meaning where the text becomes the image and the image becomes the text.

In Walks Talks Flies Swims Crawls, the elegantly rendered letters take on a three-dimensional, ribbon-like quality, becoming objects in their own right. The puzzling phrase is delicately built up through fine layers of gunpowder, a medium Ruscha began using in 1967, and which he favored for its ability to richly impregnate the surfaces of his paper, as well as for it charged associations with contemporary American life. In applying the gunpowder to his drawings, Ruscha used cotton balls to layer the powdered substance and Q-tips to create the words and finer touches.

In discussing his decision to work with gunpowder, Ruscha explained, “I soaked some gunpowder in water once, and I saw it separated all the salt out of it. I just did it as an experiment. The gunpowder itself is in granules. I could see it would make a good choice of materials; it could actually impregnate on paper. You could use it almost like charcoal… Graphite was much more laborious, but it has a different feel altogether... So gunpowder was simple, it was easy to get going.”