Summary
Pay Nothing Until April depicts precisely detailed snow-capped mountains contrasted against a yellow sky suggestive of sunset or sunrise. The low lighting casts azure blue shadows down the sides of the central peaks while the foreground is rendered by the dark silhouette of an incline that cuts across the bottom right corner of the tableau. Painted on top of this landscape is the seemingly unrelated phrase ‘PAY NOTHING UNTIL APRIL’ in a clean, modern font that is evenly spaced so that each word occupies a separate line in the centre of the picture. This work belongs to a large body of paintings, begun in the 1980s, in which Ruscha overlays natural landscapes with texts (see also Daily Planet 2003, Tate AR00048).
To create this work, Ruscha sprayed a thin layer of paint onto the canvas, then worked the image up in acrylic paint using medium-sized brush. The text was applied using stencils, and is presented in Boy Scout Utility Modern, a typeface of the artist’s own creation described by him as a sort of ‘no-style’ (Richards 2008, p.82)… (read more)
Other works of art you may be interested in
