Begin Anywhere (2024) moves from deep red at the top through a blended centre to rich navy at the bottom, the gradient running the full width of the horizontal format without interruption. BEGIN sits in the upper half in spaced grey capitals, ANYWHERE larger across the lower register, both lines of text rendered in a silvery grey that sits just above the colour field.

The phrase is unlike most of Ruscha's chosen text. His lexicon tends toward the found — road signs, trade names, overheard speech, the functional vocabulary of the American built environment. BEGIN ANYWHERE is none of those things. It is an imperative, addressed directly to whoever is looking, and it is unusually generous in what it asks: not begin here, not begin correctly, but begin anywhere, the location and method left entirely open. For an artist who spent six decades approaching his subjects with studied neutrality, a work that addresses the viewer this directly is a significant shift in register.

The gradient does considerable work. Red to navy is the American flag's palette rearranged, the colours of patriotism and politics dissolved into atmosphere, neither asserting themselves as symbols nor entirely escaping association. Ruscha had been absorbing the colour of the Los Angeles sky — the smog sunsets, the Pacific dusks — since 1956, and this field has that quality: specific without being literal, a colour condition rather than a colour statement.

Produced in 2024 as a hand-pulled lithograph in an edition of sixty, Begin Anywhere is among the most directly communicative works of his late career — a print that arrives, in his late eighties, with the authority of someone who has earned the right to give simple instructions.

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