Today I went with an old friend to a retrospective exhibition of the work of Ed Ruscha, (see earlier post) a modern American painter, photographer and typographic loon. The exhibition was great, I'd been to it before, but there was plenty of work I'd never seen. Highlights included a giant blue canvas with the word OOF printed in bold yellow letters across it and a quote about how he'd always imagined assaulting the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which he painted on fire. However, it was after the exhibition, in the gift shop that I made the discovery that, in turn, made my afternoon- a man called Robert Bechtle. Bechtle paints hyper-real scenes taken from his own photos of family, friends, houses and cars. Lots of cars. He lives and works in San Francisco and taught for 20 years at San Francisco State University. Journalist Peter Scheldahl summed up a 1969 article on Bechtle's paintings with this sentence
"Life is incredibly complicated, and the proof is that when you confront any simple, stopped part of it you are stupefied."
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