Executed in 1973, Ed Ruscha’s Two Sheets with Whisky Stains belongs to a series of roughly three dozen works on paper made between 1971 and 1973 in gunpowder. Each illustrating blank, suspended sheets of paper as if ripped and dropped from a sketchbook, the work’s titles are so named after their subject and a material used to “stain” the paper, whether foodstuffs, chemicals or fluids. Two Sheets with Whisky Stains depicts two sheets of paper lightly stained with Scotch whisky atop a background of gray rendered in gunpowder, dark shadows cast beneath them. The resulting image possesses a trompe l’oeil effect; as if airbrushed, the surface is so precise one could almost grab the stained sheets from the two-dimensional surface.

Of his use of gunpowder, Ruscha said, “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…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” (Ed Ruscha, quoted in Alexandra Schwartz, ed., Leave Any Information at the Signal, Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 155-156).

Adding substances ranging from alcohol to the oil from fruits and spices, Ruscha continued these experimentations in unconventional mediums with the sheet drawings. Following his ribbon text works of 1966-1971, these works would “advance the representational riddle of the ribbon drawings: a sheet of paper is pictured illusionistically on a paper ground via the subtractive process of masking out, so the object figured as three-dimensional is actually the flattest and least worked area of the support. Paper and stain, both, are simultaneously real and represented; the stain, in penetrating the support and affirming its flatness, destroys the pretense of illusionism even as it comprises part of an illusionistic rendering” (Lisa Turvey, Edward Ruscha, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works on Paper, Volume One: 1956-1976, New York, 2014, p. 32). As such, works like Two Sheets with Whisky Stains are the first self-referential pieces in Ruscha’s prolific oeuvre, representing a pivotal shift from the literal to the conceptual.